DESPITE the eclipse of his death in 1963 by the assassination of President Kennedy on the same day, the reputation of C. S. Lewis has continued to grow, both here and in the United States. His Narnia Chronicles and his religious writings remain popular and in print.
The Chichester Festival Theatre revival of the 1980s play about him (Feature, 30 January) has visited Broadway and is now in the West End. It begins with Lewis downstage in his academic gown, giving a lecture on the problem of suffering. Although an English don, he ventures into theology. The action deals with Lewis’s personal development as he becomes affectionate with an American divorcee, whom he then marries for friendship and passport reasons — “ a bureaucratic formality” — but whose death from cancer after they have three years together shatters him.
Hugh Bonneville plays Lewis. Although he is not a natural stage actor, his Downton Abbey legend has brought people in. Sadly, some of them seemed to lose track of the gentle Christian apologetics and looked at their glowing phone screens instead. Bonneville’s Lewis is a bluff and diffident don in the first half, never quite relaxed, be it in the SCR or at home with his kindly army-veteran brother, Warnie (Jeff Rawle). By the second half, Bonneville brings out some colour and a few gestures beyond the stand-and-deliver style of acting.
The foil to this is Maggie Siff’s Joy Davidman, who has corresponded with him from New York, then comes to visit, and is invited to stay for Christmas. When she divorces her adulterous husband, she decides to move to Oxford with her son (in real life, she had two and brought them both).
Davidman gets the zinger lines here — “Cold, dull, don’t much care for the weather either,” she says of the Oxford atmosphere — and Siff is an involving actor, especially when she is confined to a hospital bed in the later scenes. Hers is the more successful rapport with the audience, including a joyful 1950s delight in ordering hotel room service when she and Lewis are on their “honeymoon”, a contrast with their saying prayers in bed.
Davidman is presented here in William Nicholson’s script as the more serious Christian, at the expense of her own status as a writer. The love story is equally problematic, when, with sights so firmly set on tweedy Lewis, she moves precipitously to the UK. Timothy Watson brings some bite on this as the waspish Professor Riley.
The set is a place of high bookcases, dusty armchairs, ticking clocks, and chiming bells. The director, Rachel Kavanaugh, uses centre-stage for more intimate scenes, and brings actors into a circle for group scenes. It is appropriately old-fashioned and gentle, aided by Howard Harrison’s lighting and Carole Hancock’s period costumes.
Lewis is lachrymose, come the end. “Experience is a brutal teacher, but you learn fast,” he says. His trademark pipe does not appear once.
Shadowlands runs at the Aldwych Theatre, 49 Aldwych, London WC2, until 9 May. shadowlandsplay.com