Tolkien Play, Pacific Theatre

Incredible writing. Superb acting. Loved the sets and costume.  Kind of Darkest Hour with Hobbits. Opening night. Always a treat. Seeing friends. Over the years so many people returning for the highest minded theatre on the coast. Real challenges of ethics and morality.  The theatre as it’s own ‘my utmost for his highest’. Enlightenment meritocracy.  Ron Reed, director and playwright extraordinare. This script would please C.S. Lewis for sure and certainly have Tolkien’s interest.
I loved learning more about the Inklings. Never knew Owen Barfield was a part of this.  John Innes unfortunately absent opening night plays J.R.R. Tolkien but Ron Reed did a really good understudy job replacement though needed written prompts even though he’d written the play. That itself was ironic and amusing given all the irony already in the high minded play. Much British humor that would tickle John Cleese.  Certainly a respite from the low brow fake news of present day.  This really did challenge one to think and consider.  At the core was truth and friendship.
I truly loved Ian Fathing’s C.S. Lewis.  He really was Lewis as I imagined him.  Tim Dixon played a great role as Warnie Lewis, the Lewis military brother.  I didn’t really know Tolkien had been in the WWI trench warfare  Battle of Somme or even that C.L.Lewis was in the WWI front and took shrapnel in the fierce trench fighting. They both lost several close friends together there and this certainly affected their subsequent outlook and inner life.
The delightful contrast of Tolkien’s catholicism and Lewis’s conversion from atheism to Christianity is so well played.  We don’t talk of religions or life and death and meaning these unidimensional hedonist consumer days.  Everyone thrives on lust and  perversity while being offended by lust and perversity.  The real fighting in mud and blood seemed to have lifted these men together out of the genitals of self. Even Campbell, played by Simon Webb who also played writer Dyson, had been in the Spanish War.  The communists and fascist so clearly described as different sides of violent totalitarianism. The verbal descriptions Shakespearian in their vividness with no one needing severed heads on stage to make the point.
I loved Edith. Eria Faye Forsythe who  played Tolkien’s wife with all the wisdom and genius of the women who were partnered  the great men of that era. I’ve loved all of Forsythes acting, so sensitive and dynamic. Her timing is elegance itself.  Anthony F. Ingram played Charles Williams who I quite didn’t know.  That’s history. A great man of the day and in later years forgotten while Tolkien and Lewis remain as classics.  Ingram played him amost American and a harbinger of the Anglican church today with all the ‘magic’ left and the perhaps the ‘mystery’gone.
I loved Tolkien’s term ‘northerness’ a mystical reference which is all but lost in loudness of the racist obsessed southerners.  Beowolf, a study of myth and reality.
I’d read all these books in my teens 20’s and 30’s so knew Beowolf, read all of Tolkien and most of Lewis. I loved Catholic Tolkien’s line that said Lewis’s Mere Christianity was too mere.  It was clear that this was a time before political correctness when people were frank with each other.  No wonder these writers became like polished pearls with the obvious support and cutting criticism of each other. Today every meeting of Inkllings would have been followed by a dozen law suits.  I see students scurrying away from Tolkien and Lewis to their safe places and trauma counselling. I’ve loved Lewis, Tolkien and  Owen Barfield and and realize others of the Inklings served up the very ideas that served to set the sails of my own personal trajectory.  It was moving to be reminded of the idealism and reverence of my younger years.  I don’t think of these things much now  in the cacophony of postmodern  ‘fake news’ , "false witnesses" ,  "new totalitarianism" and ‘victimology’. There’s a gentleness in the world of men who have served their country and fellow man and see friends die and know the foolishness of leadership who want to be leaders.
The play speaks to a past both individual and societal. It also speaks  to the friendship of men and God but mostly of men.  It really was a play like all the great plays.  It had us all talking and checking encyclopedias long after we’d left Pacific Theatre. Laverne our Professor of Literature companion said she couldn’t wait to search out a reference to ‘cake and ale’.  There were so many layers, from a really good biographical history romp to subtle meanings within meanings.
I loved the Tree.   Set designer Drew Facey said much with just that tree. And today I learned from science that trees have heartbeats.   I loved  all the moving parts, and black clothed young people pushing things about in scene changes.  I loved Gauthier's and Hood's excellent costume design.   I loved Cabilete’s Stage Management and Akesen and Colhoun’s Sound Design. They were all so perfect that it was easy to just be in the play without consideration of the light and sound and background.
It really was all simply perfect.  Everything about the play rung true, universal and ancient.  A masterpiece.  It was  sheer gift to have been there tonight.