★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
The problem of pain is tackled first in the form of a theological lecture. That may not sound like an auspicious start for your night out at the theatre. However, William Nicholson’s biodrama Shadowlands becomes poignant, given time, as Stephen Boxer portrays CS Lewis with quiet brilliance and tenderness. There’s surely not a dry eye in the house by the end.
In fact, even being lectured proves quite engaging as Boxer’s Lewis darts to the front of the stage, leaving his chalkboard behind, to address the audience directly. Though a 1950s éminence grise in his Oxford don’s gown, he is perkily humorous while theorising on why God might make us suffer in this world. The surprises that are to come for this Christian apologist and hitherto seemingly confirmed bachelor are threefold: the arrival in his life of Joy Gresham (played by Amanda Ryan); his falling in love with her; and her heartbreaking early death from cancer. Tested by experience, his faith endures a dark night of the soul.
Admirably, Ryan’s Joy manages to be bookish and a breath of fresh air. An American fan of Lewis’s writing, she dauntlessly relaunches herself in middle age to become his intellectual soulmate. Divorcing her alcoholic husband and moving to England with (in this version) one offspring in tow, she makes amusingly short shrift of Lewis’s chauvinistic colleagues who don’t want her anywhere near their ivory tower.
What’s particularly absorbing about Boxer’s performance is how understated it is. Rather than signposting patently repressed inclinations in Lewis from the off, his performance allows an intriguing ambivalence to remain regarding where the platonic ends and the romantic begins. Meanwhile, Denis Lill plays Lewis’s brother, Warnie, as an increasingly magnanimous old buffer (replacing Tony Slattery, who had to withdraw from this nationally touring production owing to health issues).
Unfortunately, the director Alastair Whatley’s cast can’t save Nicholson’s script from looking like a screenplay not made for the theatre. Shadowlands first won acclaim as a 1980s TV film and then as a 1993 movie and this stage adaptation suffers from a plethora of awkwardly short scenes in multiple settings. Yet that seems a cavil by the close, for this is a portrait of love and grief that profoundly touches a chord.
Salisbury Playhouse (01722 320333), to Mar 5; then touring to July 30