Dear Joan…

By imitating the dog

Dear Joan… is the second in a trilogy of shows based around letters or correspondences involving figures from history. The first piece, Dear Einstein, was made for Light Up Lancaster 2023 and centred around a hypothetical and somewhat fantastical conversation between a man worrying about his death and the physicist Albert Einstein. In Dear Joan… we turn our attention towards C. S. Lewis and the letters he wrote to children during his life. 

imitating the dog’s Artistic Director, Simon Wainwright, says: 

I stumbled upon a series of letters Lewis wrote when researching how this next piece might take shape and in particular one he wrote to a girl named Joan imparting some of the most succinct and useful advice on writing that has maybe ever been committed to paper. The contents of the letter seemed like too good a gift to pass up (the words spoken from the letter in our piece are almost exactly as they were written to Joan) and all that was needed was a dramatic device to hang it on and so, as is often the case, I looked towards the moment of his death. In a strange incidence of chance he died on the same day as both Aldous Huxely and John F Kennedy, the latter’s dramatic and shocking assassination almost entirely robbing Lewis of any space in the headlines or even footnotes until several days after his passing. When all of these elements were added to the rich picture of Lewis’ imagination that we know from Narnia… well the piece landed almost fully formed. 

Our work is all about telling stories through live performance, which can sometimes be a challenge in light festivals. The elements, the budgets and the logistics are often against us but we try, where possible, to still add in a live element to our outdoor shows and we’re very lucky to be able to make the work we want to at Light Up Lancaster despite the challenges. Dear Einstein had a community choir singing along with our famous physicist but for this piece we wanted to play with the audience’s expectations and imaginations by using both a “real” performer and a video performer to play Lewis. In doing so, we hope that what you see tonight has some sense of the playfulness and magic of his most loved books.