MAYER WAKEFIELD has reservations about the direction of a play centered on a DVLA re-training session for three British-Pakistani motorists
Intriguing confrontation let down by script limitations
F+L
New releases from Steve Knightley, Jupiter & Okwess, Jason Palmer, Lisa Knapp and Gerry Driver, Kin'Gongolo Kiniata, Ingrid Laubrock/Tom Rainey, Dan Sealey, Simin Tande, PAZ
JOHN GREEN relishes photography that unfolds a longstanding and poetic relationship with Leeds
A uncomfortably misogynistic authorial voice that sometimes seems to lack insight troubles FIONA O’CONNOR
MARY CONWAY is disappointed by a production that panders – if inadvertently – to Western prejudice against China
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a history that excavates the enormous role played by agricultural workers in recent times
ALEX HALL recommends a book that places empirical evidence at the heart of understanding racism
Freud’s Last Session
King’s Head Theatre
CS LEWIS’S 1933 novel The Pilgrim’s Regress featured a character called Sigismund Enlightenment who is referred to as a “vain and ignorant old man.” It was a barely veiled swipe at the psychoanalyst Sigismund Freud whose almost total disregard for religion rubbed the recently converted author up the wrong way.
Perhaps fortunately the two never met, but their ideas have been brought together frequently, most notably in Armand Nicholi’s book A Question of God which provided the inspiration for Mark St Germain’s 2011 play.
It is September 1 1939 and Lewis (Sean Browne) has made the train journey from Oxford, against the traffic of those leaving London with war looming, to visit the ageing Freud (Simon Bird) in his Hampstead living room. The conversation quickly turns to God. Freud cannot fathom why someone as educated as Lewis “can abandon truth and embrace an insidious lie” in the form of Christianity.
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