Anthony Lawton's "The Great Divorce' (2nd review)

Many religious people seem concerned about whether they'll go to heaven or hell after they die, and they guide their thoughts and actions accordingly.

For instance, they believe in God, go to church, are faithful to their spouses and kind to their neighbors, give to the poor, point to the sky when they score touchdowns, and beg forgiveness for their sins.

But to C.S. Lewis, the path to heaven is both simpler and more complex. As Lewis suggested in his 1946 novella The Great Divorce, it's simpler because heaven-hopers need only shed the earthly attachments that prevent them from being free.

The problem is that we generally don't want to relinquish things we've become attached to, or attitudes and behaviors that have helped us succeed in negotiating daily life.

And salvation is more complex because to shed things, attitudes or behaviors is to lose ourselves— that is, to drop the very qualities that we've come to think make us what we are. Stated positively, they make us individual and distinctive among other humans; on the negative side, they constitute our psychological baggage.

Hell on earth

Anthony Lawton brings this paradox to the stage in his one-man adaptation of The Great Divorce. A stranger gets on a bus filled with quarrelsome people from a dark and apparently endless town— hell on earth because earth is hell. They visit heaven, or at least its foothills, but when they see what it's like and what would be demanded of them to enter, most prefer to return home— a terrible mistake, in Lewis's opinion, but a natural one.

The beauty of Lewis's original is that it's filled with dialogue and the doings of everyday life. It may be philosophical at heart, but it's show, not tell.

Three-sided conversations

The techniques of fiction in The Great Divorce surely made the adapter's job easier, but Lawton's superb acting makes the work come alive. He portrays more than a dozen characters with stunning individuality. Two- and three-sided conversations pour from his mouth and physical movements, as if we were watching members of a repertory group.

Abstract ideas about heaven and hell, and the path to either, take corporal and emotional forms, which Lawton makes so grounded that I enjoyed the play without caring much about the religious angst underlying Lewis's original.

Faceless narrator

If there's a hole here, it's in the narrator. Although we find out much about the people he meets— their names, problems, shortcomings and, in some cases, their good qualities, so that we can judge their fitness for the kind of heaven Lewis presents— we know little about him.

In the novella, he's a professor named Clive (Lewis's first name), but I didn't hear his name or profession mentioned in the performance, although it is clear that he is educated. We learn at the end that the entire spectacle is his vision, or daydream. But we haven't heard why he was privileged (or condemned) to imagine it.

What the narrator lacks in details, his fellow passengers possess in spades, as they illustrate Lewis's religious point that the crutches people pick up to get through life are not only useless in heaven but even detrimental.

Worse than murder

The shrewish wife whose henpecked husband had died is thrilled to learn that he is in heaven, and she looks forward to resuming her nagging and faultfinding. But it's precisely that "baggage" that prevents her from entering "joy forevermore," or "reality."

The factory foreman is appalled to find that heaven holds one of his former crew because the underling had murdered a man and obviously violated a Commandment and even worse.

"Murdering old Jack wasn't the worst thing I did," he tells his old boss. "That was the work of a moment, and I was half mad when I did it. But I murdered you in my heart, deliberately, for years. I used to lie awake at nights thinking what I'd do to you if I ever got the chance."

The speaker qualifies for heaven, however, not because he has atoned in any conventional sense, but because he has liberated himself from earthly concerns— which his former boss cannot do. The boss bullied this deceased worker on earth and yearns to resume the harassment. He rejects his ex-minion's offer to work in heaven and decides to return to his hell on earth.

Lawton's similar journey

Lewis seems to have known this journey deeply. He was baptized as an Anglican but became an atheist before returning to Christianity. A typical convert might assume he finally found a spiritual home thereafter, but Lewis wrote repeatedly of what he had discovered. He often settled on the word "joy"— a condition that he could hardly define but that seems represented by the shedding of earthly baggage as depicted in The Great Divorce.

Lawton, curiously, made a comparable journey. He is a life-long Catholic but said, at a post-play discussion, that his original motive for entering acting was "selfish"— he was interested in the applause and attention. He freed himself from that shackle, he suggested, when he decided to offer audiences something spiritual, which would promote a dialogue in audiences, whatever their faith (if any) or strength of commitment.

The Great Divorce is clearly Lawton's commitment. He has performed this adaptation more than 100 times since the late 1990s, in short stints such as one at the turn of 2009 and this one-week stand. Don't miss the next one.♦


To read another review by Jackie Atkins, click here.
To read Dan Rottenberg's review of a 2006 performance, click here.