C. S. Lewis - Narnia, etc.

[Anita Bensoussane]

Hope you have a great time on 23rd December, Courtenay! Don't forget to let us know your thoughts once you've seen the show.

[Courtenay]

I will, definitely! In the meantime, this review is one of the ones that sparked my interest in going to see it.

[Anita Bensoussane]

The review does make it sound intriguing. I like the phrase "rapturously wild" in the following sentence:

By the end, it’s become something that feel rapturously wild, as Narnia awakes in a frenzy of colour and feeling from the century-long magical winter placed on it by Laura Elphinstone’s sleekly malevolent White Witch.

[Courtenay]

Well, that and all the review's talk of "shamanic" and "pagan" elements wouldn't be at all inconsistent with C.S. Lewis's own vision of Narnia — far from being a stuffy puritanical sort of character, he absolutely loved pagan mythology (especially Norse and Greek) and infused a lot of it into his stories. In Prince Caspian, as you probably remember, there's a full-on romp with Bacchus the wine god and his "wild girls"!! (But it's also made clear that the Pevensie children are safe so long as Aslan is in charge of everything.)

[Stephen]

I'm re-reading 'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe' which I've always found to be a very "Christmassy" book. However, it's occurred to me that if the order of appearance is anything to go by, it should really be called 'The Wardrobe, the Witch and the Lion'.

[Daisy]

Good point Stephen, but it doesn't trip off the tongue so nicely... and one could say that the most important has been placed first!

[Courtenay]

I went to the performance of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe at the Bridge Theatre in Southwark this afternoon and will now share my impressions of it as requested!

The choreography and general stagecraft were brilliant and very creative — the review I linked to earlier was certainly right about it feeling "rapturously wild" with "full-on weirdness". In fact, I'd say it was verging on the psychedelic with all the colour and movement and general craziness. But while that was lots of fun in itself, it wasn't really at all like how C.S. Lewis himself portrays Narnia in the books — full of magical creatures and amazing happenings, but still somehow friendly and familiar and a place where you can imagine people from our world would feel at home, rather than a sort of trippy-hippy extravaganza, which this play was. Again, I don't necessarily mind that per se, but it wasn't like anything I would recognise as Narnia!

Another interesting touch was that they used black actors for the four Pevensies, as well as for the Professor/Aslan (played by the same person). I was wondering if that meant they'd change the setting of the start of the story, since the reason for the children being at the Professor's house is that they're child evacuees from London during WW2. That only gets a brief mention right at the start of the original book — technically the part of the story that takes place in our world could easily be set in another time or place and with characters of any ethnicity, since that doesn't have any real bearing on the plot. But no, the play actually made a far, far bigger feature of the wartime setting and its implications than the book does, which made the choice of actors look a bit incongruous to anyone who knows anything about history. It's not a major problem, but I couldn't help thinking that if the many young kids in the audience came away with the impression that London's population in 1940 was just as diverse as it is today, and that a black family in 1940 would have been happily and comfortably accepted as part of average middle-class society... well, they would be dead wrong.

The basic plot of the story wasn't changed in any major way, but the way it was paced was unfortunately really rushed, with no time to build up suspense or let anything really sink in. In this version, Lucy's first visit to Narnia, Edmund following her when she gets in the second time, Peter and Susan's conversation with the Professor, and then the four children all getting in, were made to all happen in the one morning!! Seriously — that just gave us no real build-up of tension between the characters and no real sense of the mysteriousness of Narnia. Obviously they do have to shorten the story a fair bit to fit it into a 2 1/2-hour play, but I felt that was compressing it a bit TOO much. (Though it conveniently meant there was no problem with the children wearing exactly the same clothes the whole time. ) They also had Mrs Macready near the start as a rather nasty, strict, scary woman, but they didn't include her inadvertently chasing all four children into Narnia with her party of tourists. Which was a shame, since the actress who played Mrs M. also played the White Witch, so that would have been an interesting touch!

I also didn't feel the characters of the children themselves were very well portrayed. They're very distinctive in the book and all the film/TV versions, but here they were all pretty much played as if they were slightly hyper 21st-century teenagers (minus their iPhones, of course). Lucy in particular was much too old for her part — she's 8 in the book, according to Lewis's later timeline, but she looked at least 12 or 14 in this production — and she had none of the sweetness and gentleness and innocence that are so much a part of her character in the books. Edmund was a rather geeky teen with some insecurities, but really very little of the outright nastiness he has at the start of the book (or at least, he wasn't given much time to show it). The young actors in these parts weren't bad, but I didn't get the impression they were needing to act as anything much other than the modern teenage Londoners that they are — the scriptwriter's fault, not theirs. They just did not come across at all as the Pevensies we get to know in the original books, which I felt was a big downside of the whole production.

I was wondering how impressive the White Witch would be, but she was a disappointment too — far more cheesy than scary. As for Aslan... this was probably the biggest let-down of all. He was portrayed by a guy (the same actor who played the Professor) in a big fur coat, with a sort of huge lion puppet (with spooky glowing pupil-less eyes, dragonfly-like wings and assorted flowers in its mane) hovering around in the background, very rarely even held above the human actor. So it didn't even feel like Aslan actually was a lion at all, let alone a breathtaking, majestic, awe-inspiring presence that you can't help being drawn to. Which pretty much cuts out the whole heart of the story.

So, in short, a technically spectacular stage performance, but just not Narnia. Two and a half stars out of five from me.

[Anita Bensoussane]

Thanks for the detailed review, Courtenay. I enjoyed reading it, though it's a pity that the production failed to capture the wonder and innocence of Narnia.

[Courtenay]

I really enjoyed this recent BBC Radio 4 discussion and thought others here might also be interested (it's 28 minutes long):

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

Although it was written nearly seventy years ago, ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’ still appears in the top ten favourite children’s books and has sold over 100 million copies in 47 different languages. It's set in the magical Land of Narnia where the White Witch has cast a spell to make sure that it is always winter and Christmas never comes....

I was a bit scared that this was going to be another hatchet job on a beloved children's author (after what the BBC so recently did yet again to Enid ), but thankfully I was completely wrong. It turned out to be a very positive and interesting discussion of what's special about the book and why it's still so popular, including some great rebuttals to critics' claims that the underlying Christian themes in the story are "propaganda" and "manipulative" — the speakers really bring out how widely appealing the book's message is, whether or not one reads it from a religious viewpoint. One point they make that I hadn't really thought of is how Lewis simply crams the story full of the kinds of things he took delight in (even if some are a bit incongruous!) and then draws us in as readers to experience that delight as well.

Well worth a listen if you're interested!

[natalieb]

It's understandable if Netflix or whoever are going to be... pragmatic... with how they adapt "The Horse and His Boy" as it is such an encrusted myth that the book is a wholesale attack on Islam.