Freud’s Last Session – King’s Head Theatre, London

Writer: Mark St Germain

Director: Peter Darney

What did the great men and women of history have to say to one another in private? Playwrights really do like to speculate. Friedrich Schiller brought Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I together for an entirely imaginary sparring session, Michael Frayn envisaged a real-life meeting between Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg and now Mark St Germain dramatises a fictional mutual therapy session between Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis, receiving its UK premiere at the King’s Head Theatre directed by Peter Darney.

Having criticised his theories in print, Clive Staples Lewis pays a visit to his antagonist Sigmund Freud expecting to be chastised. Over 80 and suffering from a painful throat cancer, Freud may be physically frail but his intellectual perspicacity is undimmed and the pair sets to debating everything from the existence of God, the role of science and resentment of their fathers. As Chamberlain announces war with Germany, will they find any common ground before it is too late?

Having achieved some off-Broadway acclaim, Darney brings his production to London set in Freud’s study on 1 September 1939. Freud’s daughter Anna sought to recreate her father’s Vienna consulting room in Hampstead and designer Brad Caleb Lee provides a flavour of both crowding his desk with religious artefacts from numerous civilisations, oblique art works and a painted floor that combines dreamscapes and surreal images with classical religious imagery, much of which is referenced in and helps to set the scene for this meeting of two great minds.

Running at around 85-minutes without an interval, St Germain has created a series of intellectually intense debates that evolve into chapters as the play unfolds as the men exchange opposing philosophical and experiential views on a variety of topics. There is never any sense that either will change their mind or be forced to rethink their world view in any fundamental way which dampens some of the drama but the story gains traction as the audience spends more time wading through their thoughts.

But as with so many dramas about real people, St Germain has relied on their writing to create the dialogue, giving Lewis in particular a stilted essay-like quality that never really feels like genuine conversation. The reaction time, the manner of expression and construction of speeches feel lifted from written text, lacking the versatility and immediacy of unrehearsed speech and the pressure of debating a wily opponent. What they say is interesting but there is a flatness to the drama that makes it difficult to see them as rounded and multidimensional human beings.

Julian Bird’s Freud has the best of it, his slightly irascible nature exacerbated by illness, chronic pain and a foreknowledge that he is close to the end of his life, lifting the exchanges and offering shades of cynicism, humour and occasional regret that add texture to the production. Bird’s Freud is occasionally cornered but never beaten, determined to have the last word and certain that his choices have been the right ones, but Bird also gives him an underlying warmth that creates some sympathy for his plight.

Séan Browne has much less to work with as Lewis, a collection of theories and arguments pressed together to create a character but with no real distinction of personality or even a life beyond this duologue. Browne does well to suggest the long effects of shell shock resulting from Lewis’s service in the First World War and the painful memories that the sound of air raids dredges up, but St Germain misses a trick in not using more of Lewis’s real experience to flesh out the theological debates.

Freud’s Last Session is a hefty play filled with punchy debate anchored by a central disagreement about the existence of God, a discussion that St Germain plays out but never takes sides. “One of us is a fool” Freud proclaims, and it is left to the audience to decide which it is, a choice made more difficult by never really getting to know either man.

Runs until 12 February 2022