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The worst thing about Ron Reed’s play, Tolkien, is its title.
You hear that title, you see that poster, you think that it’s just another biopic, like the film of the same name that came out a few years ago. You’re going to go in there, find out about Tolkien’s sad childhood, meet a lot of on-the-nose characters who (it is implied) inspired the character of Nienna1 or whatever, and finally see him begin to sketch the beginnings of the legendarium on a sickbed in France, but not until after he endures The Horrors of War (TM). And it won’t even star Colm Meaney as Tolkien’s priestly father figure!
As a result, reader, I did not actually want to see Tolkien when it came to Open Window Theatre in March 2025. However, I had just finished reading The Lord of the Rings to my daughter (who was also mid-Narnia), she was excited for it… and I had free tickets. So I dadded up and took her.
I’m glad I did, because Tolkien turned out to be the favorite out of all the stories I’ve encountered this year. (Second place probably goes to The Outer Wilds.2)
Open Window’s staging is very good, as usual. As someone who’s seen a bit of Tolkien singing, Shad Cooper sold me immediately on his Don Tolkien. I am sure then-executive director Jeremy Stanbary must have been tempted by the role. Stanbary is always a pleasant presence on stage. Yet I think he was wise to defer in this case, because Cooper was crackerjack.
As someone who has not listened to any C.S. Lewis, I always imagined him as the elderly uncle in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I was therefore startled by the youthful energy of Caleb Cabiness in the part… but, of course, how else could Lewis possibly be? The man must have been young, even when he was old. I quickly fell under Cabiness’s spell, as I imagine many of Lewis’s students did.
I particularly enjoyed Ian Hardy as Warnie Lewis, C.S.’s brother. The play has pushed Major Warnie into a comic relief role—occasionally even pulling him into scenes in which he could not possibly have participated just so he can drop a rapid-fire bon mot or six—and, what can I say? Hardy made me laugh. The production struck me as unusually spare for Open Window, but nevertheless effective. When the script is good, Open Window never fails to rise to the occasion.3 They give good value for your dollar, on par with other small local theatre companies.
The play is not a biopic. It is not even about Tolkien, as such. It is the story of J.R.R. Tolkien’s friendship with C.S. Lewis between 1926 and 1949. Everything in the play4 is there to show that friendship either building up or breaking down. When their literary works are mentioned, it is only insofar as it services that story.
The building-up of their friendship is the story Western Christians have been enamored with for decades: the great Lewis and Tolkien, reading their books to one another over drinks, conspiring to protect the Western canon in the Oxford syllabus, telling jokes in obscure dead languages, all years before either was famous! Tolkien captured Lewis’s imagination so thoroughly that Lewis found not only friendship, but God! Lewis, in return, convinced Tolkien to give the world hobbits, instead of keeping them locked up in his desk drawer! We love that! Why wouldn’t we?
But it is the latter story—the collapse of the friendship—where Tolkien finds its true north.5
Playwright Ron Reed knows his subject is not the man, but the friendship. Open Window notes in the playbill that Reed offered an alternative title for this play: Tollers & Jack: The Story of a Friendship. This is a much better title, if a touch on the nose.
I assume Open Window went with Tolkien anyway for marketing reasons. Open Window is an explicitly Catholic professional theatre, with a Catholic donor base and largely Catholic advertisers. It’s probably easy to sell their specific audience on any play that has the One Ring on the poster (even if the One Ring is never actually discussed in the play). By contrast, Tollers & Jack would make people think they’re going to see some kind of Jeeves & Wooster spinoff starring Jack the Ripper. Worse, “The Story of a Friendship” sounds like the tagline of an Equestria Girls movie.
Open Window is very consistent in how it titles these things. Their play about St. Nicholas is called Nicholas. Their play about Joan of Arc? Joan of Arc. St. Pier Giorgio Frassati? FRASSATI.6 It is therefore unsurprising that they chose the title Tolkien.7 I find this approach refreshingly direct.
Tollers and Jack is still a better title.8
I knew the story in broad strokes, as most do: I knew Tolkien and Lewis were very close at Oxford and that they were the core of the literary circle known today as The Inklings. I knew that Tolkien disliked Narnia, while Lewis thought the songs of the elves could be a bore. I knew Tolkien was the model for Dr. Ransom in Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, and I knew that the abrupt tonal shift in the final book, That Hideous Strength, of which Tolkien did not approve, was due to the influence of Charles Williams. I knew that Tolkien believed C.S. Lewis would have become a Catholic, but for Lewis’s deep Ulster prejudice against all things “Romish.”9
However, I have always averted my eyes from the details of the catastrophe. As far as I can make it out, most have. Even Humphrey Carpenter’s acclaimed biography, The Inklings, tries to explain the decay in their friendship with two paragraphs on page 256, then rushes on to Joy Davidman and Till We Have Faces, his eyes sliding away from the pain.
Ron Reed looked it straight-on, discovered everything that was discoverable about it, and wrote a play from what he found. I know this, because there were several passages in Tolkien that I thought were a little ridiculous, a little overwritten, or a little too on-the-nose. I then looked up what had actually happened. Infallibly, it turned out Reed had told the solemn truth, usually with near-verbatim quotes.
No play can tell the historically true story of the end of a friendship. There are too many different views from the participants. Blame is cast, memories warp with time. Far too much of it happens in the hidden recesses of the heart, where a man’s choices might not be clear even to himself. For example, can we entirely trust Tolkien’s claim, in the 1960s, after Lewis’s death, that Charles Williams had come between him and Lewis? Probably not—at least, not if we also trust Tolkien’s statements about Williams in the 1940s and 1950s. Much is unknowable.
The cold biographical facts are all here, of course: Lewis’s enthusiasm for Charles Williams, whose writing Tolkien disdained. Tolkien’s enthusiasm for Roy Campbell, whom Lewis disdained for his politics—and, in Tolkien’s eyes, for his Catholicism. Lewis’s great popularity as a lecturer on Christianity, which Tolkien (who had brought Lewis into Christianity) saw as rather vulgar, prideful, and not sufficiently respectful of Mystery. (Tolkien’s assessment may have been tinged by jealousy; he was not yet famous.) Reed’s script brings new and welcome emphasis to Tolkien’s immense personal strain and exhaustion, especially during the War, which led doctors to beg him to take a term off. (He didn’t.)10
Yet these are only strains. Strains exist in every long-lived relationship, because people change. Strains do not destroy friendships. Choices do. A responsible biography can’t quite show you those choices. A play must.
What is best in Tolkien, though, is not what it says about the end of this friendship, but what it says about the end of every friendship. Most of us have never experienced these particular strains, because we have never been famous Christian writers at Oxford around World War II… but we’ve all lost friends, and we’ve all seen the choices that lead there. Which of your dead friendships does this remind you of?
TOLKIEN: [Charles Williams’s] worked his magic on you, I’d say.
LEWIS: You make it sound like a schoolgirl crush.
TOLKIEN: You wouldn’t be the first. He gives a talk on chastity of all things, and every pretty young thing in Oxford lines up to meet him!
LEWIS: Perhaps at least some of them are drawn to that inner goodness.
TOLKIEN: Perhaps some of them can read. […]
Pause
LEWIS: Listen, I’ve dropped by to see what you’re up to. Williams asked me to drop off the Pain manuscript for the Press to look at. Probably get lunch at the Eastgate. Care to join us?
TOLKIEN: I wouldn’t want to disrupt things.
LEWIS: You’d hardly be.
TOLKIEN: I’ve work to do.
LEWIS: Alright.
Beat
TOLKIEN: Look, Jack. You know what’s overdue? A good old-fashioned late-nighter. That’s how I’ll get unstuck – give you the whole picture, Middle Earth-wise, see if you can break the logjam. Or even just sipping sherry and poking the fire, the two of us. […]
LEWIS: Wish I could. Fact is, I’m short on time as well, particularly with this BBC business hauling me up to London. Tuesday lunches, and Thursday night Inklings, that’s about all the time I can spare.
TOLKIEN: Yes, well, of course.
LEWIS: Come summer, eh?
TOLKIEN: Come summer.
This scene comes very early in the erosion of the friendship, and, considered in itself, there’s nothing really wrong with it. However, it contains within it all the choices that will, in the end, tear them apart. Tolkien criticizes Lewis’s friend. He makes it personal.11 To an earnest defense, Tolkien concedes nothing, but responds with sarcasm, the acid of relationship. Lewis (generously) extends an invitation anyway, which Tolkien begs off. Tolkien makes a counter-invitation, excluding Williams—but Lewis, by now quite irritated, now begs off himself.
Every deep friendship has days like this, of course, and any friendship worth its salt will survive it.12 What friendship cannot survive is a barrage of days like this.
Tolkien and Lewis are both gentlemen. What’s more, they really do dearly love one another. As the play progresses, they put their disagreements behind them, over and over. They extend a hundred little olive branches to one another, each humbling himself a little each time, for the good of the friendship.
Yet each confrontation leaves a wound. Before the wound is fully healed, there’s another, and another. The deepening scars make everything more charged. By the final days, comments they might once have received as light teasing, they now hear as sharp personal attacks.
By the final days, they are right.
The penultimate scene finally pushed me to tears. It pushed me to tears again later that night, when I did my research and discovered that it really did end this way:
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