PATRICK MARMION says Hugh Bonneville is loveably bashful on stage in Shadowlands

Shadowlands (Festival Theatre, Chichester)

Verdict: Bonneville is loveably bashful 

Rating:

Dying of cancer in a hospital bed, C.S. Lewis’s American wife struggles to tell him: ‘I love you.’ His gauche, spluttering response is: ‘Er, better now!?’ If I was her, I’d have torn off my intravenous drip and decked him.

But it’s a measure of Hugh Bonneville’s charisma in William Nicholson’s sweetly sentimental play about the Narnia author’s late life romance that the line actually gets a laugh. His gaffe is to be construed as loveable English reticence.

Nicholson’s 1985 play is best known from the 1993 film with Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger and aims to be quite serious by tackling big questions about God and suffering.

The action is framed by excerpts from a lecture given by Lewis, who worked as a Professor of English at Oxford University. He argues that joy and pain are inextricably linked. Nicholson’s play puts Lewis’s theory to the test by having the cagey bachelor fall in love with an American fan, Joy Gresham (Liz White), and then nurse her through her terminal disease (although he hardly gets his hands dirty).

The heart of the play lies in the character of Joy herself: a quick-witted writer with rapier put-downs for the stuffy Oxford dons who surround Lewis like pompous courtiers. 

Typical of them is Timothy Watson as Professor Christopher Riley (a character loosely based on J.R.R. Tolkien). He is a gorgeously horrible creature and a witheringly effete misogynist whose anti-American sneers lead him to waspishly inquire if Lewis’s ‘children’s books’ had to be translated into American English.

White deftly scythes him down by asking ‘are you being offensive . . . or merely stupid?’

But the charming thing about White’s performance is that she keeps such thrusts short and sharp, remaining elegant and luminous amid the fusty academics.

Without her glow, Bonneville’s C.S. ‘Jack’ Lewis would be little more than a dusty bore. She lends him a kind of street-cred by endorsing the warmth, decency and wry humour that lurk beneath his tweedy suit.

Thanks to her, we’re able to forgive a character who would otherwise have to be condemned as an emotional dimwit; a man who took years to summon the courage to utter those three simple words ‘I love you’.

It helps, too, of course that Bonneville is bashful, cuddly —and better looking than his jowly historical counterpart.

Andrew Havill gallantly covers the more curmudgeonly qualities as C.S.’s live-in brother Major W.H., expressing light scepticism at his marriage to Joy but gamely offering to move out.

W.H. also highlights my big problem with a play that largely sidelines the much greater loss suffered by Joy’s nine-year-old son (a plucky young Eddie Martin the night I saw it).

The play treats him as merely an echo of Lewis’s pain at losing his own mother at the same age. Nicholson should surely have made more of his suffering.

Rachel Kavanaugh’s slick production neatly sidesteps this omission and instead focuses on Lewis’s spiritual longings and romantic agonies, which eventually come to a head over sherry at Joy’s wake.

Peter McKintosh’s set likewise evokes sleepy Oxford academe effectively, with a twinkling vision of snow-covered Narnia beyond an edifice of oak shelves filled with antiquarian books.

And, crucially, the denouement between Bonneville and White, his emotional redeemer, will bring tears to your eyes.

Jude (Hampstead Theatre, London) 

Verdict: Jude the obscure 

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