In this welcome revival of William Nicholson’s now classic play, a superb script and brilliant acting deliver a terrific evening at the theatre. Shadowlands is the real ticket: moments of Shavian wit and repartee spar with Chekhovian tenderness and sadness; not to say melancholia.
From the moment C. S. Lewis, invariably known as Jack and wearing an Oxford don’s gown, steps onto the stage, we are on our way. He has come, it seems, to lecture us on faith, love, and suffering. Far from being introspectively precious or donnish, his address is a prolegomenon for what follows: a dramatic exploration of love and loss, and the fear that suffering may be meaningless, that God may not hear us. The play has philosophical depth and hinterland. You would expect no less from its protagonist C. S. Lewis, one of the most renowned scholar-writers of his time.
Nicholson is well versed in Lewis’s life, his learning and social background, his creative writings for children, and his Oxford all-male get-togethers: men without women, covens of middle-aged men who dine in hall every night when not doing so in female-free zones of exclusive London clubs. Timothy Watson’s Professor Christopher Riley, a Wildean wit who wouldn’t know, let alone want to know, the other sex, puts in a terrific boarding-school-boys-blissfully-alone-at-50 performance. He is too naturally abstracted from the existence of women to be called misogynistic. When Joy responds to one if his singularly inept questions by asking him whether he is being deliberately ‘offensive’ or ‘just stupid’, he looks credibly hurt. And we almost feel sorry for him. In his world of sherry, port, tea, and common room, he is just being himself – no offence intended, let alone to a brash American woman; ‘brash’ and ‘uninhibited’ as all the dons on stage take all Americans to be.
C. S. Lewis’s love affair with Joy Davidman, a relationship that blossomed from intellectual affinity into passionate love, is a matter of historical record. Before meeting Davidman, Lewis was a confirmed bachelor, or so we are led to believe. He and his brother, played in a beautifully understated manner by Jeff Rawle, lost their mother when C. S. (Jack) was nine years old. The two boys, separated for a while by boarding school in England (they were born in Belfast), in later life, after two World Wars, became each other’s best friends. An English version of the Goncourt brothers, only the Lewises are rather kinder to women than their French counterparts.
By 1947 Lewis was famous enough to be featured on the cover of Time magazine as a leading British intellectual. His Late Mediaeval and Early Renaissance work has lasted the course to this day. At some point he refers casually to his ‘OHEL’ volume (he glosses it for Joy as the Oxford History of English Literature), which is still required reading on many university courses. It was through OHEL that Lewis launched Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney and Spenser into their proper literary sphere in 1954. His famous The Allegory of Love had been equally seminal twenty years earlier. That the author of that 1930s classic about courtly love should himself become a courtly lover at first (in courtly love the adored lady remains forever unobtainable), and then a real lover, is a neat irony. Evidently it was written that Lewis should fall in love at some point. Tragically for him he only realises the sheer depth of his love for Joy when she is dying of cancer. So that the only times together granted to Jack and Joy are her few years of remission. There is a wonderfully touching moment when she asks him about his nightly turning-in routine. He hasn’t quite realised that, as of that moment, now that they are bound in holy matrimony, she too will be in that bed.
It is a deeply poignant play. The love of Jack and Joy is not the teenage, at times toxic, riotous relationship of Cathy and Heathcliff. Instead, it is grounded in the immediacy of the small change of domestic routines, comfort, and companionship– a middle-aged happiness as deep as anything more physical. When Jack tells Joy what he feels about coming home to her after a day’s teaching, to know that his wife will be there sharing his home, it is hard not to choke. And here, as she dies, we inevitably return to Lewis’s opening soliloquy about loss: what if the people we loved and lost can never ever be met with again? that we may never again see their faces or hear their voices? Will God not help – why does He not help – since he made us who we are and granted us the gift to love?
Of course none of this would strike such a moving chord were it not for the superb performances by Hugh Bonneville and Maggie Siff. Bonneville is C. S. Lewis, combining expressive attention to detail and a profound understanding of his character with a delivery of lines that instantly inspires confidence. Everything in this production seems perfectly timed and imagined: from the set to the choreography, with a superb ensemble cast that moves across the stage with great elegance. This night out at the Aldwych is one to remember. In years to come it will be set alongside some of the grand shows from other eras of the theatre’s illustrious history.
Shadowlands
by William Nicholson
Director: Rachel Kavanaugh
Cast includes: Hugh Bonneville, Maggie Siff, Jeff Rawle, Timothy Watson, Tony Jayawardena.
Choreographer: Kathleen Marshall,
Set Designer: Peter McKintosh
Sound Designer: Fergus O’Hare
Costumes: Yvonne Milnes & Peter McKintosh
Until: 9 May 2026
Running time: 2 hrs 20 mins inc. interval.
Photo credit Johan Persson