Shadowlands

 Aldywich, London

Naturally, while I was in London for the Hitchhikers Guide, I also saw the new production of Shadowlands. Or possibly vice versa. 

It’s about that children’s religious writer I am inclined to go on and on about. It started life as a TV film; which was turned into a stage play; and then into a movie; and also at least two radio plays. I’ve only seen the stage version once before (in Coventry in 1992 with Denis Adams and Jacqueline Pearce!) 

I assume you know the plot? And I assume, unlike a particular writer on Facebook, you are not concerned about spoilers? Famous writer meets American fan. Famous writer and American fan become good friends, definitely just good friends and nothing more than that. Famous author marries American fan so she can get an English passport, definitely just so she can get an English passport and for no other reason. American fan diagnosed with terminal cancer. Famous writer has Christian marriage with American fan at bedside in the cancer ward. American fan’s cancer goes into remission for three years. American fan dies. Famous writer sad. 

Hugh Bonneville was, of course, perfectly cast as CS Lewis. It’s a hell of a role for an actor to perform. At least, I imagine it is. I imagine it is difficult to go from full-on weeping to facing the audience and delivering a composed closing monologue. But maybe that’s just a skill that you can learn at RADA, like vibrato and high Cs at music school. Maggie Siff is very nearly as good as Joy Gresham. I imagine (again) that it is an equally challenging role. She has to convince us that Lewis would be entranced by this woman, and that all his male cronies would definitely not be; and she has to appear in different states of health — near death, recovering, almost recovered, on her death-bed — in heartbreakingly quick succession. On the posters outside, the couple don’t look completely unlike the extant photos of Real Jack and Real Joy. (CS Lewis was always known as Jack, never Clive. You knew that, probably.) 

I never saw the original 1989 stage version, but it is widely reported than on the first night, there was a pause before the ovation, during which the sounds of sobbing could be heard from the audience. That wasn’t quite the case tonight: but as the stage blacked out I could distinctly hear a voice say “wow”. 

Well, quite. 

I have always thought the stage play was superior to the TV play, and very much superior to the movie. Scenes which seem stagy in Richard Attenborough’s overwrought film make more sense when they are actually performed on, er, the stage. The play opens with Jack delivering a witty but slightly smug lecture on Why God Allows Suffering. (“By pain, I don’t just mean a nagging discomfort in the intestines. Come to think of it, by love I don’t just mean a nagging discomfort in the intestines either.”) It’s a device; but it introduces the themes of the play, and gives us some fairly painless exposition (“Of course, as a comfortably situated middle-aged bachelor I must be quite an authority on pain and love…”) It is much easier to swallow when it is being delivered to us, the Aldwych second night audience, as opposed to a churchfull or extras in 1950s garb. It isn’t quite the same argument that Real Lewis made in the Problem of Pain, but it will do very nicely. 

The programme insinuates that the play is derived from A Grief Observed, the journal that Real Lewis kept after his bereavement and published anonymously; but relatively few of the ideas of that painfully honest book make it onto the stage. (The book is about the weeks and months after Joy died, which we only get to in the last fifteen minutes of the play.) Real Lewis contemplated the possibility that God was, after all, evil: Stage Lewis says “This is a mess, and that is all there is to it”, and his faith in heaven, at least, is restored by the final scene. 

The play, in fact, derives rather more clearly from a poem called The Ruin Falls in which Lewis accuses himself of hypocrisy and says that not only love, but bereavement and loss, has humanised him. “For this I bless you as the ruin falls. The pains / You give me are more precious than all other gains.” Of course, a poem is a poem: we can't assume that "I" is straightforwardly Jack and "You" is straightforwardly Joy. 

Most sensible people think that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were storytellers: presenting the Very Early Christians’ beliefs about Jesus but not necessarily in all cases providing a factually accurate record of what "really" happened. (This is also true of A Complete Unknown.) Shadowlands is definitely not the gospel truth; but it is true in very much the way the gospels are true.

The programme also contains an essay by someone called AN Wilson, which would have been greatly improved by the addition of some phrases like “Allegedly”, “Possibly”, “Perhaps” and indeed “According To A Controversial Biography By Mr AN Wilson”. As a matter of fact, I think that CS Lewis probably did have an affair with Mrs Moore, the much older woman who he called Mother, even though she was not related to him. Walter Hooper said that Owen Barfield said that CS Lewis said that he did. But I don’t think you ought to type “she was his mistress” without further qualification. 

There is a similar undercutting essay about the Real Joy by Abigail Santamaria who wrote a biography of Joy that I have not read. She says Joy had a literary crush on Jack long before they met, to the extent of writing love sonnets to him. I can see why someone thought it was a good idea to contrast the slightly stained-glass-window portrayal of Jack and Joy on the stage with an warts-and-alll depiction in the programme, but it left a slightly annoying taste in my mouth. 

The play has evolved slightly since I last saw it: I guess that happens with big revivals when the author is still around. Tonight’s version followed the film in showing Jack and Joy going on a belated honeymoon to a Hereford valley that Jack associates with heaven. (The original showed them going on a slightly more historical but rather less theatrical package holiday in Greece.) The scene in which Jack has no idea how room service works is still very funny. (“A gin and tonic. And…another gin and tonic. In fact, two gin and tonics. Two gins and tonic, strictly speaking…”) I miss the scene where Joy exposes the “buried assumptions” in Jack’s views on higher education because it made the point that Joy was as clever or even cleverer than he was, even if she wasn’t learned. But we retain the all-important symbolism of Douglas (Joy’s son from her first marriage) reading The Magicians Nephew. That’s the book in which Aslan-Jesus magically brings a dying mother back from the point of death, shortly to be given a doubtless entirely faithful movie adaptation directed by Greta Gerwig. When Jack and Joy have their full Christian marriage by Joy’s hospital bed, the massive bookcases which frame the stage slide away, and Douglas pulls a magic apple from a frosty Narnian tree. And, of course, his mother does get better and they are happy. For a while. 

The producers happily resist the temptation to have a full sized wardrobe on stage, but there is a lamp-post, by which Jack obligingly stands, surrounded by dry ice.

Warnie (Jack’s brother) is played by Jeff Rawls (George the Newsreader off Drop the Dead Donkey, many years ago.) He’s kind of a comic foil: openly surprised by the marriage-of-convenience; and just slightly too jocular when trying to comfort Douglas. (“Buns, buns, buns!”) But he is also the voice of good sense. When Jack says he hasn’t got time to tell Joy all the things he wants to tell her, it's Warnie who says that it won’t take long and he should just say what he wants to say. When Joy dies, it’s Warnie who tells Jack that all he has to do is talk to Douglas. 

But the chorus of dons and vicars — a kind of stand-in Inklings, representing Jack’s college friends — are rather flat caricatures; which is a fault of the script rather than the production. I have never quite bought the scene where one of the dusty academics starts to pontificate about women having souls rather than minds; although when Joy fires back that she can’t tell if he is being offensive or merely stupid, it rightly brings the house down. But I think the broadness of these scenes may have leaked into other parts of the play. 

Hugh Bonneville posted a message on Facebook saying “Spoiler Warnings: It’s funny.” I understand this: it is a very witty play, and he rightly wanted to push back against any sense that it was a God-Slot weepy. Reviewers have noted that it is a little old fashioned, and it is shocking to think that it is now more than forty years old. 

But I do think that some moments which should perhaps have been bitter-sweet became more overtly funny than they needed to be. (“We have a tradition in America; it’s called proposing. It means the guy asks the girl.” “We have that too.” “Did I miss it?”) We don’t quite get to hear Jack’s full explanation as to why the Christian objection to remarriage after divorce doesn’t apply in his case because Bonneville’s delivery gets a big laugh. The explanation is definitely funny, but perhaps it shouldn’t be laughable? 

The ending, obviously, remains devastating. The moment Jack blurts out his love for Joy to the vicar….who replies “I am sorry, I didn’t know” is one of the most moving in the show, and indeed, anywhere. (“No” says Jack “Neither did I.”) And, of course, in the final scene, the playwright turns the sentiment right up to eleven, where perhaps a contemporary writer would have gone for subtlety. Jack sobs uncontrollably as the young Douglas, who is not crying, tries to comfort him. We are told that Lewis was emotionally frozen because he didn’t cry when his own mother died. This may not be literally true, but it is clearly the gospel truth.

But I’d agree that despite this knock out emotional punch, the play is at its best when Jack and Joy are just being friends and then partners: the awkward meeting in the tea shop; the very awkward first meeting with his academic friends; and the unbearably awkward registry office marriage. (I loved the way Bonneville shows us that until the actual ceremony Jack didn’t know that Joy’s actual first name was Helen!) I could probably have done with out the use of the revolving stage, with the two of them facing each other saying that they are happy, and they know they are happy, and they never ever thought they could be this happy. (I believe this caused technical problems on the opening night.) There is a moment in the “honeymoon” where Joy reminds Lewis that she is going to deny, and instead of being winsome and tragic yells “I’m going to die!” at the hills, which is absolutely perfect. 

“Nicholson’s play is focussed on matters of life and death, which are central to all of us, regardless of our feelings about CS Lewis and religion.” Well, up to a point, Mr Wilson. I don’t think it would be the same experience if the protagonist was Prof. Authory McAuthorface, a writer you were previously unaware of. Yes, certainly, the play is about life and death, which is to say, it is a play about human beings written by a human being to be watched by human beings, but it is rather emphatically about life and death from the point of view of someone who believes in God. I suppose there could be an atheist in the audience who regards the opening salvo about Why God Allows Suffering in the same spirit as if it were about Why the Great Green Arkleseizure Allows Armpits; but I don’t think they would get very much out of the evening. A certain contingent in the congregation were probably fans of Downton Abbey or Madmen, and there are probably people who go to everything, but I think the majority of us were there to see a play about CS Lewis because it was a play about CS Lewis. Particularly the ones in dog-collars. 

What makes the play work so well is that all the leitmotifs in Real Lewis’s life — childhood, pain, mothers and mother-substitutes, God, heaven, courtly love, the writing of letters — seem to have come together in one final aria. 

Is it true? It’s close enough to the truth to be worth making into a story. 

“Contrary to popular belief, I don’t know everything” says Jack at one point. I like the fact that the play represents him as an academic, with references to the Oxford History of English Literature (OHEL!) and lectures on the Romance of the Rose. It situates him as the author of the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, but it isn’t about Narnia in the way that, say, Dreamchild is about Alice in Wonderland. And although his faith is front and centre, it is not one of those Lives of Saint Jack which tells the story of the Christian evangelist who happened to do some teaching as a day job. 

It uses the Lewis Of Faith as a lens through which to examine the Jack of History, or perhaps vice versa.

But those aren’t the questions you want to know the answer to, are they? 

Yes, I cried. I cried buckets. I cried so much I literally had to dry my collar and my cuffs in the bathroom afterwards.