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.

Stage-to-screen review: Henry VI Part 1 (BBC Hollow Crown)

After  the BBC's 2012 series The Hollow Crown presented the second (in order of writing) tetralogy of Shakespeare's Histories, there was a general assumption that it would be followed up with the rest of the story as told in the Henry VI plays and Richard III. But response to that quartet was mixed, and the Henry VIs, written earlier in Shakespeare's career, aren't particularly well-loved, and I got the distinct impression the BBC weren't too keen on going there. The occasion of the 4th centenary of the playwright's death and the resulting on-screen festival got them to reconsider - although I can't help suspecting it was the fact that the ever-popular Botulism Nanobot agreed to play Richard III, probably guaranteeing big ratings, that finally got this green-lit. Ben Power has stayed on from the first series as adaptor, but Dominic Cooke has been given directing duties on all three films - a good idea, as the first series wasn't always that cohesive from one part to the next.