The Devil has rarely been given his due more perceptively and eruditely than in C. S. Lewis’s “Screwtape Letters,” an epistolary novella that has a look at the Christian religion from the point of view of the other side. And in a humorous and lively stage adaptation by Jeffrey Fiske and Max McLean now enjoying at Westside Theater, he is every inch the cunning English gentleman he is often supposed to be.

Lewis was a don from Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1941 when he penned “The Screwtape Letters” and committed it to his friend and colleague J. R. R. Tolkien. Both men would later engrave their place in English literature with children’s tales — Lewis with “The Chronicles of Narnia” and Tolkien with “The Lord of the Rings” — that explored the dark side in daydream fiction. But Lewis’s early writing concentrated on spiritual themes, and he is still one of the most effective Christian writers of the 20th one hundred years.

 

“The Screwtape Letters” is one side of a commensurateness between Screwtape, an under secretary in the Devil’s hierarchy, or Lowerarchy as he puts it, and his nephew, a junior tempter named Wormwood who is seeking to recruit a young Christian man, referred to only as “the patient,” to the bring about of “Our Father Below.” Get the screwtape letters pdf

 

The stage version will start with a heavily edited reading of “Screwtape Proposes a Toast,” a sort of epilogue to the “Letters” that Meriwether Lewis wrote shortly before his death in 1963, in which Screwtape delivers a start speech to a graduating class of tempters. The scene then moves to Screwtape’s skull-lined office in hell where, dressed in a red-and-gold brocade smoking jacket, he dictates his letters to Toadpipe, his secretary, counseling Wormwood on how to subvert his “patient” by fostering selfishness, desire, pride (especially pride in his own humility) and the rest of the seven deadly sins. “The safest road to hell,” Screwtape advises, “is the gradual one.”

 

Mr. Fiske and Mr. McLean have been steadfast to Lewis’s original text, although there has been some shuffling of the letters; for example, when several cite to the patient’s mother are compacted into one monologue in the play.

 

As satirical and brilliant as it is, “The Screwtape Letters” is nonetheless a sermon at heart, and sermons are not often the stuff of riveting drama. The humor of this stage adaptation is generally cerebral, and a large part of what may seem to make it successful is an energetic performance by Mr. McLean as Screwtape that brings some semblance of action to the stage. Karen Eleanor Wight is competently reptilian as Toadpipe.

 

One doesn’t have to be a Christian to perks from or enjoy “The Screwtape Letters.” Whatever a person’s faith may be, people failings and foibles are lovely much the same the world over.

 

“The Screwtape Letters” continues through Sept. 30 at the Westside Theater, 407 West 43rd Street, Clinton, (212) 239-6200; telecharge.com.