Theatre review: Shadowlands

Star of Bonekickers, Hugh Bonneville makes a rare venture to the stage in Shadowlands, William Nicholson's play about Narnia author C.S. "Jack" Lewis, his late-blooming love life and the way it put to the test his Christian treatises on why god lets humans suffer. Lewis opens the play delivering a lecture on this theme, before returning to his fellow Oxford dons (Tony Jayawardena, Fode Simbo, Giles Taylor and Timothy Watson,) who see him as a poetry lecturer with a funny little sideline in children's books. He's also known for his arrested development as far as sex is concerned, a pious bachelor who lives with his brother W.H. (Jeff Rawle) and barely speaks to any women unless he's addressing the WI. He does, however, have a female pen-pal in Joy Davidman (Maggie Siff,) a married New York poet who heard of Lewis through her son's love of Narnia but started corresponding with him because of his religious writing.

When Joy and her son Douglas (Ayrton English, alternating with Nathan Jago and Louis Wilkins) visit England over Christmas they meet with the Lewis brothers; when her husband divorces her they move to Oxford permanently.

Jack suggests a chaste, secret civil marriage of convenience to give them UK citizenship, as his beliefs won't let him marry a divorcee in the church, and he only considers their relationship to be a friendship. It's only when Joy is diagnosed with terminal bone cancer that he realises he's been in love with her all along.

Bonneville is as understatedly good as you'd expect, something which applies to Rachel Kavanaugh's production more broadly as well: Shadowlands is a gentle drama, quietly effective but hugely old-fashioned; I can't imagine many people are coming to this for fireworks and surprises, so they won't be disappointed when they don't get them.

They will get an entertaining enough evening - Nicholson provides a lot of funny moments from the coterie of stuffy professors, the sharp-tongued American woman, and the clash between them when she talks back to Watson's spiky atheist Christopher. But there is definitely a sense of stripping things back so far that they're at a bare minimum: Douglas is all but mute, as if the playwright felt that giving a child character a personality was a bit too much wasted effort.

Inevitably this will be a more emotionally effective evening for people with a personal connection to Jack's situation and/or his religious convictions, but while Siff is very good at making you like her quick-witted but vulnerable character, it's not enough to feel like the subject's been explored in any kind of depth.

Shadowlands by William Nicholson is booking until the 9th of May at the Aldwych Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Johan Persson.