Shadowlands review – Hugh Bonneville stars in a poignant stage revival
This heartfelt affirmation of love and life is our critic’s kind of happy.
This heartfelt affirmation of love and life is our critic’s kind of happy.
There’s hardly a dry eye in the house at the end of Shadowlands, which is about the writer CS Lewis’s doomed romance with American pen-pal-turned-wife Joy Davidman. The play – turned into a movie in 1993 with Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger – is far from a corny tear-jerker, though; it’s a heartfelt affirmation of love and life in the midst of death.
At its centre is Hugh Bonneville – this month’s Saga Magazine cover star – who returns to the London stage for the first time in more than two decades.
In 2019, Bonneville played CS “Jack” Lewis at the Chichester Festival Theatre’s revival of William Nicholson’s play (which started out as a TV film in 1985), and the role fits him as comfortably as the dressing gown that the author of the Narnia books wears over his suit when he’s been too busy with academia to get the heating fixed in his Oxford home.
It is into this house, piled high with books, that the poet Joy strides with her son in tow. Maggie Siff plays her as a no-nonsense woman who softens Jack’s stolidness, the tragedy being that he only realises he loves her when he’s losing her to cancer.
Nicholson’s text treads lightly, musing on God, pain and suffering without laying things on thickly. Here, under Rachel Kavanaugh’s deft direction, the tears are earned not milked, and that has a lot to do with Bonneville and Siff’s chemistry, and their commitment to the roles. When he dissolves into jagged tears, his anguish cuts deep and we are witnessing an actor at the top of his game.
Played out on a revolving stage, with a bookcase that opens to reveal a child’s imaginings of a moonlit Narnia, there’s a hint of magic to the proceedings. There’s comedy, too, in the interplay between Lewis and his chums in academia, with Jeff Rawle especially engaging as his brother Warnie. The two siblings are a bit like My Fair Lady’s Henry Higgins and Colonel Pickering, although Joy is more of an educator than Eliza, schooling Jack in matters of the heart.
Some have carped that Shadowlands lacks punch and is a bit too cosy. I disagree. Yes, it moves at a leisurely pace, but it’s immaculately staged and superbly acted. When Lewis tells Joy, “This is my kind of happy,” theatregoers who enjoy the unfussy pleasures of a well-made play are likely to be thinking, “This is my kind of happy, too.”
Shadowlands is at the Aldwych Theatre, London, until 9 May.
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