October 12, 2007 - Express.co.uk - Charles Dance (AREDIAN) - Stars in London's Wyndham Theatre play - Shadowlands

Love lifts the shadow

SHADOWLANDS HHHH Wyndham’s Theatre, London, 0870 950 0925, until December 15

By: Julie Carpenter

Published: Fri, October 12, 2007

Charles Dance and Janie Dee are fantastic as CS Lewis and Joy Graham
 

To describe this play by William Nicholson as a tearjerker would be to belie just how genuinely moving it is.

Best known for the 1993 film adaptation starring Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger, Shadowlands explores the relationship between Narnia author CS Lewis and the outspoken American poet Joy Gresham, whom he eventually married.

The unlikely pairing of an Oxford don committed to a life of bachelorhood and a free-spirited “Jewish-Communist-Christian” divorcee makes for an interesting subject. But what gives the story its poignancy is the fact Lewis can only confront his feelings towards Joy when she is diagnosed with cancer.

While the focus of the play is tragic, this production achieves a careful emotional balance. Importantly, it does not tip into the sentimentality that characterised the movie.
 

This is due to the sustained wit that flies like sparks throughout the production but is also because the focus is on Joy’s remarkable philosophy that pain and happiness are irrevocably linked. “Why love if losing hurts so much? The pain now is part of the happiness then,” Lewis quotes later.
Charles Dance plays Lewis – whom Joy knows as Jack – as a quite jaunty, good-natured academic, if one committed to the emptiness of emotionally self-sufficiency before Joy’s energy brings him out of such a stultifying existence.

Dance brings an extraordinary humanity to the role through his initial diffidence and the difficulties he encounters in both recognising his feelings as love and then in coming to terms with its loss.

The final moments, where he is racked with grief and pain, are intensified by the honesty with which he plays a man to whom such deep emotions are so new. He is matched by Janie Dee, whose devil-may-care vibrancy and gusto at the outset only serve to highlight the cruelty of the illness.
She is more than a match for Lewis and his crusty colleagues and she refuses to relinquish her spirit or her highly acerbic wit.

Strong support is given by the rest of the cast, most notably John Standing as Professor Christopher Riley and from Richard Durden as Lewis’s brother Warnie.
 

And nice visual touches include a heavy wardrobe opening up into the world of Narnia and enticing Joy’s young son Douglas into the hope and magic it represents. 

The play is peppered with Lewis’s Christian ideology but sharing his views is by no means the only route to enjoying a play which deals head-on with love, loss, suffering and humanity.
The most surprising thing is how the experience leaves you uplifted as well as moved.
A version of this review appeared in editions of Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s Daily Express.