Leave It To The Imagination

An enterprising production of C. S. Lewis’s enduring story and the clever staging of a famous mountaineering drama prove captivating

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I READ in the programme for the excellent production of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe at London’s Bridge Theatre that C. S. Lewis’s novel has been translated into almost 50 languages and sold more than 100 million copies. The figures are staggering, especially when you consider that Lewis, when he wrote the book in 1950, was a bachelor Oxford don. How did he create a seemingly timeless story with a global popularity?

Watching Sally Cookson’s brilliantly inventive version, first seen at Leeds Playhouse in 2017,it struck me that Lewis’s book has the endless adaptability of myth. It can be seen as a Christian parable, an endorsement of monarchy, a fable about seasonal change. It may even be all those things simultaneously, but in this dramatisation, with Adam Peck credited as ‘writer in the room’, it’s also a study of wartime evacuation with the four Pevensie children pitched into a world that’s both perilous and exciting. The company has seized on this idea by issuing the audience with green identity labels, having an onstage band play wartime standards and showing Operation Pied Piper, the code name for the initial evacuation in 1939, in full flow. Even when the Pevensie four go through a wardrobe to enter the kingdom of Narnia, we are reminded that the Second World War is never far away.