THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS

John Cleese (of "Monty Python" and "Fawlty Towers" fame) follows up last year's "coup de mike," Dante's INFERNO, with this quirky, brilliant rendering of Lewis's tongue-in-cheek Screwtape. Uncle SCREWTAPE, a master devil, herein gives advice to nephew Wormwood on the ins and outs of entrapping human souls. Ever-sensitive to his text, Cleese gives an imaginative and risible performance as the title demon. No Freddy Krueger he, but a bourgeois stuffed shirt--pedantic, punctilious, dry--as distinctly English as Mephistopheles is German. In addition to the humor arising from this approach, Cleese manages clever, novel ways to deliver individual passages for maximum power. This is, after all, a moral satire. He is over the top but never out of control, for he never overshadows the text. A star turn of the finest kind. Y.R. Winner of AUDIOFILE Earphones Award ©AudioFile, Portland, Maine [Published: JUN/JUL 99]