Shadowlands

 

Shadowlands, William Nicholson, directed by Rachel Kavanaugh

I haven’t actually done a play before – after all, this is a book review blog - but Shadowlands made a powerful impression which I would like to revisit in future. The connection to books is very strong anyway: C S Lewis was not only a prolific author but also an outstanding professor of literature whose life was immersed in books. Shadowlands is the story of how he produced a sincere but perhaps rather academic book called The Problem of Pain, strong on theology but arguably lacking in emotional engagement, followed years later by the much more personal A Grief Observed in which he is deeply afflicted by bereavement. The script is peppered with quotes from many of Lewis’ writings, but from these two in particular abundance.

We start with Lewis in the all-male environment of his Oxford college, holding forth among his colleagues, a well assorted ensemble, and successfully presenting as a widely popular theologian who was publishing and broadcasting regularly. An American fan, Joy Davidman, comes crashing into this sheltered world. Like Lewis, Joy is very bright and is a published poet. She is also loud, uninhibited, and tells it out straight. None of his colleagues like her and neither does Warnie, the brother Lewis shares his home with – at least at first. In due course some of them revise their opinions…

In life Joy is accompanied by her two children, in the theatre by just one, Douglas. Reflecting on this later, it’s possible that this omission isn’t just about cutting costs or making movement on stage more manageable. I wonder if it echoes the loneliness of Lewis’ childhood, which he describes eloquently in Surprised by Joy? This was the loneliness that Lewis filled up with myths and imaginations, which were ultimately to bear fruit in the sphere in which he came to see their true fulfilment, in Christianity. It was touching to see Douglas also beginning to explore this world.

Moreover if Douglas represents the loneliness and the yearnings of Lewis as a child, could he also represent other aspects of his childhood? Douglas loses his mother as a mere boy – but Lewis has been there too: his mother died and left him bereft when he was only 9 years of age. Is this then what Lewis’ life is currently about? Are the donnish environment and the carefully constructed theology ways of keeping grief at bay? Is he in retreat from love because if you don’t love your mother you can’t be hurt when she goes? No human love lasts for ever, and the more deeply we love the more deeply we grieve in our bereavement. Is this behind the platonic and stoic resonances that sometimes appear in Lewis’ Christianity at this period?

Joy goes on to make herself indispensable to Lewis in a secretarial / managerial sort of way, until the time comes for her visa to expire and she must return to the States. By this time she has divorced her alcoholic and abusive husband. Lewis offers marriage as a means of staying in the country, only technically a marriage with no personal bond implied.

But life has a habit of disruption. Joy is diagnosed with incurable cancer and given a very short time to live. This is the moment when Lewis realises he loves her. There is a proper marriage, “in the eyes of God.” Shortly afterwards, in a beautifully rendered scene, Joy experiences remission. They have three blissful years together. It’s like a miracle! But then the cancer returns with a vengeance. Joy dies and Lewis is left to pick up the pieces: pieces not only of his broken heart but of what is presented as his earlier, trite theology. Joy has challenged him to love, truly love, and he has courageously taken up the challenge. But the deeper the love, the deeper the grief. Was it worth it?

I’ll come back to this, but first a few comments on the stage production. Elisa and I went to the Aldwych to see it on 1 May 2026. Hugh Bonneville was outstanding as Lewis, radiating sincerity and integrity, but also great pathos in the latter stages of the play. It can’t be easy to project confident belief in lines uttered at the beginning when you know they are going to be undercut later on, but Bonneville does it brilliantly.

There are a surprising number of laughs in the play, which of course, as Shakespeare knew, only makes the ending more painful and moving when it comes.

The set was a wonderful conception. The rear wall was lined with bookshelves, giving the impression of an academic study and a formalised, static setting: but at rare and transcendent moments the shelves slide apart and, with the help of highly atmospheric lighting, give entrance to a magical world. This transition enacts an interior journey for Lewis, who acknowledged that his reading of myths and works of the imagination led him to discover the spiritual world, leading him out of dead materialism into the vast possibilities of redemption in Christ.

This interiority could stand for Narnia, or for the imagination, or for ideal beauty and truth, for the otherworldly light that throws our world into shadow (Platonism, with its cave metaphor for this life in which we see only flickering shadows of the eternal reality beyond, is never far away) or indeed for the presence of God, or rather for those fleeting moments when we are actually aware of him: just a little beyond our accustomed walls, but always there... Douglas, a fan of Lewis’ fable The Magician’s Nephew, has a delightful action in this other world of light which I won’t describe in case you haven’t seen the play.

But where does this leave Lewis as a believer? We were sad to discover in the brochure an introductory essay by A N Wilson that seemed to view Lewis’ Christianity as a bit of an embarrassment, likely to alienate theatregoers. It seems to me that this attitude was prevalent in the second half of the 20^th century, but it’s changing now. Young people seem to me, on the whole and with many exceptions, to be much more open-minded than the previous generation.

The play leaves Lewis emotionally broken, his certainties in tatters. Someone knowing little of his life might assume that what is portrayed here is the great 20^th century story of loss of faith: “I believed when I was a child and needed to feel that the universe was safe and had a place for me. When I grew up and found out what life is really like I walked away.” There is even a hapless vicar, perhaps a stock figure, who crassly insists that Lewis is a hero of unwavering faith when that faith is visibly wavering in front of him. Lewis most certainly asks anguished questions of the God who let his wife suffer and die, who allowed a great happiness to be cruelly wrenched from his life.

But faith that is afraid to ask those questions is not faith. Even Jesus asked them: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Somehow that 20^th century story has managed to pretend that Christians don’t know anything about suffering and that’s why they keel over at the first genuine test. But this cannot be true of Christianity, however much it may be true of the way that individuals practise and distort it, because at its heart is the Cross. A Christian who is hiding from suffering is not “taking up their cross,” but evading its gaunt and terrible shadow. If even Jesus our Master went through that valley of shadows, how can we suppose that it won’t happen to us who follow?

For nobody knows better than Jesus that the price of love in a broken world is grief, the deeper the love, the greater the grief. We are told that it is in love for us that Jesus gave himself so utterly and painfully. The cross doesn’t answer our questions, but it tells us that God gets them. Because of Christ’s sufferings, we know that God has been there, even in our worst nightmares. The God who loves us knows for Himself what we go through.

I was a full-time minister for 34 years and in that time must have conducted many hundreds of funerals. What got me through, because if you don’t put your heart into it you’re not doing it properly, but if you do put your heart into it, it will hurt, is the death and resurrection of Jesus. Not just the resurrection with the astonishing hope of a life to come: also the death, that our leader did not abandon us. He too went through that dread valley, experienced loss and grief and agony, and he accompanies us on our hardest journey.

So Shadowlands can be read as a critique of a shallow faith whose assertions are incapable of sheltering us from the vast and ineluctable fact of suffering. But it can also be read as a challenge to leave the shore of easy formulations and trite theorising and to plunge into the ocean of reality, following the Master who has gone before us: to take the risk of the love that will bring us to grief, because, as creatures of the God who is love, it is our epic destiny to love and to be loved: to pay the cost of this love because Jesus took up his cross and paid it.

The Christian question is not, “How can I lead an easy and pleasurable life where I will be protected from pain?” It is, “since I live in a world that is circumscribed by suffering and death, how can I still find meaning and purpose for my life?” Shadowlands demands that we ask that question. That’s why it is amazing.