'Shadowlands' review — Hugh Bonneville beautifully portrays unexpected love and grief as Narnia author C.S. Lewis

Read our review of William Nicholson’s play Shadowlands, now in performances at the Aldwych Theatre to 9 May.

Summary

• William Nicholson's play Shadowlands comes to the West End from Chichester
• Rachel Kavanagh directs this revival
• The real-life story centres of Narnia author C.S. Lewis and his romance with American poet Joy Gresham
• Hugh Bonneville gives an affecting performance as Lewis opposite Maggie Siff

There’s an enduring quality to William Nicholson’s 1989 play Shadowlands. Following the author of The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis (Hugh Bonneville), through the later years of his life as he unexpectedly finds love with the American writer Joy Gresham (Maggie Siff), it explores the universal, shattering experience of grief. In Rachel Kavanaugh’s production, which originated at Chichester Festival Theatre in 2019, the focus rests on the fierce intensity and the emotional highs and lows of the couple’s newfound happiness.

Jack, as Lewis is known to his nearest and dearest, first meets Joy through a letter in which she expresses her admiration for his books. A friendship of sorts blossoms and, when Joy visits England, they arrange to meet for tea. To Lewis’s surprise, he finds himself unexpectedly drawn to the quick-witted American woman, and both seem to come alive through their spirited intellectual sparring.

It is only ever meant to be a holiday for Joy, but after discovering that her husband back home has been having an affair, she decides to move to the country for good with her young son, Douglas, and start anew.

Here is when Lewis’s devout Christian faith is put to the test. Joy is a divorced woman and, in the conservative, religious academic circles he moves in, marrying her would raise more than a few eyebrows. The production could do more to illuminate Lewis’s internal struggle; after all, this is the man who wrote a seven-book Christian allegory disguised as children’s stories. Rather, his moral and spiritual dilemma is largely glossed over.

What we get instead is the rush of Joy and Lewis’s early days of love. As they take walks, the lights by Howard Harrison dim to a hazy blue, as Lewis’s eyes are slowly widened to the feelings that bubble below his skin. Bonneville begins with a stiff-upper-lip Englishness – he admits he never cried when his mother died of cancer, years earlier. But, with Joy’s encouragement, he opens up piece by piece; his final wail is utterly devastating.

Siff has a slightly trickier job with Joy: it is never quite clear how strategic she is or if she, too, is blown away by unanticipated adoration. Nevertheless, their scenes together are fuelled by affection; each look lasts a little longer than it should do. From the start, Bonneville makes his Lewis entranced by Joy’s every step.

Nodding to Narnia, Peter McKintosh's staging reveals a hidden, magical world from behind a bookcase. It suggests that beyond the shadows of life, there is something beautiful waiting. Even as doubt creeps in, infecting Lewis’s once-unwavering faith, it's an image that hangs in his every thought.

Shadowlands, now in performances at the Aldwych Theatre to 9 May. Book Shadowlands tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: Shadowlands (Photos by Johan Persson)