REVIEW: FREUD’S LAST SESSION by Mark St Germain at the Tabard Theatre 11 to 28 November 2026

‘Ideas that resonate way beyond the stairs back out to the street ’★★★★

Mark St Germain’s two-hander set on the day World War II broke out brings together Sigmund Freud, atheist, and CS Lewis, fervent Christian. The two never met in real life, but the stage is set for some intellectual sparring over the nature of logic and faith and much else besides in a smart play that gives the intellect a very pleasing great deal to do without ever quite engaging the emotions.



This latter is not the fault of two superb actors, Finlay McLean as Freud and John Kay Steel as Lewis, who parry and thrust from the first, two men who will never agree on the most fundamental question of whether there is a god (or God) while still, in perhaps the most significant contemporary lesson of the play, entirely respecting the intelligence and decency of their opponent’s hopelessly wrong position. Nor is it the fault of a beautifully dressed production, from leather-topped desk to tweed three-piece suit to, yes of course, psychoanalytical couch, nor of a highly literate script.

Lewis, then a rising academic star, arrives on 3 September 1939 to find Freud close to being claimed by cancer (he died 20 days into the Second World War), the latter having invited him as a result of reading a review Lewis had written of his work. Back and forth they go, probing each other’s reasons for faith or for the absence of it, or reasons for relying on logic and intelligence rather than myth and belief. In doing so, they discover more about what makes each other the intellect they are.

Towards the end, Freud ruefully notes that one of them will be proved a fool, but that if Lewis is right, he will be in his heaven aware of the fact, while if Freud is right, neither of them will ever know it. The dialogue sparkles and the polite conflict is sufficient to remain fascinating throughout, but the play has few emotional high points, the pick of them the moment when an air raid siren has both men forgetting logic, analysis and intelligence as they scrabble instinctively, indeed emotionally, for their gas masks.

It may be that the strictly Manichean structure rather than a more Hegelian approach slightly keeps things on the intellectual more than emotional surface for an audience. The presence of a less major third character between the pair (like Margarethe Bohr in Frayn’s structurally similar Copenhagen or poor Yvan in Yasmin Reza’s Art) might have allowed the battle of thesis and antithesis to find, or at least seek, some synthesis, even if agreement could never be possible on what is, after all, a black and white question.

That said, having the brain engaged for much longer than the show seems to take demonstrates both the fluidity of the dialogue and its delivery by the two actors, the slightly static nature of a two-way conversation also broken by air raids, phone calls, radio bulletins and the ticking clocks of the expected arrival of Freud’s doctor and then his daughter. There is nothing dull about all this; the flow of ideas is endlessly engaging. But perhaps nothing much to root for either, given that they come to respect and like one another even if there can never be a resolution to their central question, the central question of the play, of whether this is it or there’s an afterlife out there waiting. No answers here, perhaps not even enough to change a mind, but ideas that resonate way beyond the stairs back out to the street.

McLean Steel presents FREUD’S LAST SESSION by Mark St Germain at the Tabard Theatre 11 to 28 November 2026

Box Office: https://www.tabard.org.uk

Cast

Finlay McLean | Sigmund Freud

John Kay Steel | CS Lewis

Crawford Logan (voice only) | Radio Announcer

Creative Team

Mark St Germain | Writer

David Ian Neville | Director and Associate Producer

Rachel Corrigan | Stage Manager

Photography: Hunter Collins Photography

Reviewer David Weir writes The Westminster Mysteries novel series, including The Honourable Member for Murder and Motion for Murder. Plays include Confessional (Oran Mor, Glasgow), Murdering the Truth (Greenwich Theatre, London) and Better Together (Jack Studio, Brockley, London).