“Shadowlands,” the William Nicholson play about C.S. Lewis, which ran for a year in London in a production directed by Elijah Moshinsky and starring Nigel Hawthorne and Jane Lapotaire, has just opened at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. It turns out to be a major disappointment. Like the television film of the same name, which Mr. Nicholson wrote for the BBC, the play tells the story of Lewis’s strange, doomed love affair with the minor American poet Joy Davidman Gresham. Anyone who has seen the movie version of “Shadowlands” (it has been broadcast on PBS and on the Arts and Entertainment cable network) knows how poignantly and affectingly this story can be told. She was a married woman with two children (boys), a Jewish convert to Christianity, and a former Communist, who, having initiated a correspondence with Lewis, sought an introduction to him on a visit to England, which she undertook when her marriage appeared to be failing. Eventually, she was divorced (her husband had left her for another woman), and she moved lock, stock, and barrel to Oxford (with the two boys), whereupon Lewis agreed to marry her for immigration purposes. She became the love of his life, and soon afterward died of bone cancer.
I have no idea what Joy was really like, or how Jane Lapotaire portrayed her in the West End production. But Claire Bloom, who played the role opposite Joss Ackland in the television movie, was beautiful, charming, and graceful, with a kind of lively-mindedness that made it perfectly clear why a celebrated author and academic might have turned, for love and friendship, to a Jewish American intellectual divorcee. Jane Alexander, who plays Joy opposite Mr. Hawthorne in the current production, brings to the role a combination of toughness and tartness that has served her well in other roles, but for lively-mindedness she substitutes belligerence, which reduces the relationship to a hackneyed conflict between American brashness and Oxford inhibition. Moreover, where Bloom was gawky only in approaching passion, Alexander is gawky in everything. (She seems to come onstage limping.) This, along with a certain freeness of the hands and upper torso, seems to be her way of getting the idea of Jewishness across. Owing particularly to a quality of abrasiveness that Alexander brings to the role (something that A.N. Wilson, in fact, attributes to Joy in his hew biography of Lewis, which is discussed elsewhere in this issue), and owing partly to Nicholson’s script, which doesn’t give the relationship between the two people much time to develop, Joy seems to have designs on Lewis; she almost appears to be plotting.
What’s missing from this stage version is any sense that Joy had a life apart from Lewis—she seems to be merely a woman obsessed with C.S. Lewis, a celebrity-seeker—and any sense of the world she was invading. The film used images and tiny gestures to establish a moral context and ambience: a world of middle-aged men who talk to each other without looking up from their books. It juxtaposed scenes of Lewis reading, lecturing to students, and strolling through Magdalen Deer Park with references to and images from the sacred and secular medieval literature Lewis taught and studied. Nicholson’s script for the stage version substitutes Robert Louis Stevenson for Guillaume de Lorris and Chrétien de Troyes; it has Paul Sparer, Robin Chadwick, Hugh A. Rose, and Edmund C. Davys, playing a collection of stereotypical dons and vicars, spouting some sort of ghastly parody of high-table conversation; and it vulgarizes everything that in the film was subtle. As for Mark Thompson’s set, its only nod to the idea of Oxford is a vaguely Gothic front panel that moves endlessly up and down, up and down, allowing stagehands to get ready for the next scene.
Joy’s younger son, Douglas, was in his teens when his mother died. The movie fudges this a bit, making him a child of eight or nine, and fair enough: the movie wants to offer a parallel between Joy’s children and Lewis and his older brother, who lost their mother when Lewis was nine. It suggests visually that those two little boys might very easily become those two middle-aged men. In the movie, though, Lewis’s brother, Warnie, was played by an actor whose puffy feline face—he was like a maiden aunt—presented an image of passionlessness and sterility. Michael Allinson, who plays Warnie in the current production, cuts a rather dapper figure. He’s tall and distinguished—like an American’s dream of the romantic English gentleman. Moreover, since the play reduces the number of Joy’s children to one, the trumped-up parallel between Douglas and Lewis has to be pounded home verbally.
Gresham, who seems to have been involved with “Shadowlands” at every phase of its development, from screen to stage, has provided a program note for the current production in which he says that the play “comes closer to the truth” than anything else he has read “about the nature of my stepfather’s relationship with my mother.” The film made some sort of spiritual sense out of the dilemma that Lewis’s Neo-Platonic relationship with Joy posed to his Neo-Platonic Christianity. But the play, which purports to answer the question “If God loves us, why does he allow us to suffer so much?,” succeeds only in Broadway-izing everything. “Her death,” Douglas Gresham writes of his mother, “taught him…that in the very deepest despair there is hope and when by grief the entire universe is suddenly emptied, there is God.”
The movie script gave bigger play to what may have been Lewis’s true final comment on life as symbolized by Joy’s bone cancer: “This is a mess, and that is all there is to it.” Cancer is a mess, and the stories of people who die from it don’t usually get made into a play. “Shadowlands” seems to suggest that what makes the events it recounts tragic is the fact that they happened to C.S. Lewis. Given that Mr. Hawthorne, who hasn’t the authority or the presence to play Lewis with any depth or complexity, is a television star before anything else (he plays the shady secretary in the popular series “Yes, Minister” and “Yes, Prime Minister”), the whole thing has the feel of a tourist trap—the sort of play that gets mounted in London with the idea of capitalizing on Americans’ love for anything having to do with Oxford or England.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, November 26, 1990