Love lifts the shadow
SHADOWLANDS HHHH Wyndham’s Theatre, London, 0870 950 0925, until December 15
Charles Dance and Janie Dee are fantastic as CS Lewis and Joy Graham
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.
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.
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.
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.
