I genuinely don’t think I’ve ever heard proper walk-on applause in this country before. But the Shadowlands audience erupted as soon as star Hugh Bonneville walked out on stage. Either our stiff upper lipped standards are slipping, there were a load of Americans in, or Bonneville fans are simply very, very thirsty people.
Of course I choose to believe the latter, and it’s emblematic of Bonneville’s peculiarly English middle aged charm that the role that’s getting his base so hot under the collar is that of the extremely low thirst CS Lewis.
A revival of Wiliam Nicholson’s 1989 play, Shadowlands stars Bonneville as the devoutly Christian Chronicles of Narnia author, and traces his real life romance with the younger American poet Joy Davidman. And it’s largely delightful, not an odd couple meet cute, but a story about a genuine, real connection between two somewhat lost souls. He is a man in his late fifties who lives a life of scholarly bachelorhood, in rooms he shares with his doddery older brother Major WH Lewis (Jeff Rawle). But Lewis – or ‘Jack’ to most people, though his real name was Clive – is also kind and amusing. He’s hardly a monk, and indeed we learn that his inability – or lack of desire – to form attachments with women can in part be traced to trauma at the early death of his mother.
Maggie Siff’s Davodman is self-possessed and fiercely intelligent. She is brave but vulnerable, travelling the world with her sweet young son Douglas, her promising start as a poet having foundered on the rocks of motherhood, self-doubt, and a no good boho husband back in New York, whose letter asking for a divorce is what moves events on.
Not that this exactly sends the two leads into a flailing state of passion: Lewis blithely offers to wed Davidman so that she can stay in the country, but it remains a thoroughly chaste arrangement.
What finally pushes them together is also what will tear them apart: Davidman’s occasional flares of leg pains turn out to be a cancer that has gnawed its way through her femur and will soon devour the rest of her. Lewis is finally snapped out of his complacency and forced to reconsider his view of an ordered, sexless universe as he rationalises both his love for Davidman and his despair that her death could be part of God’s plan.
It’s an elegant, elegiac play blessed with two extremely watchable performances. Siff’s brittle, vulnerable charisma is extremely winning. And Bonneville is a delight – there are invariably shades of Hugh Bonnevilleness to every performance he gives, but his Lewis is marked out by a boyish animation that is in a constant tussle with his more rarified spiritual ponderings. It doesn’t exactly hurt that they’re a handsome couple, with Bonneville’s grumpy good looks smoothing over the age gap.
It’s not very horny, mind. It’s philosophically interesting and Bonneville and Siff are great as two versions of real people. But they are literally platonic ideals of Lewis and Davidman; the notion of them having an actual love life is only alluded to in the demusest of ways. Clearly Lewis was a remarkable and unusual man, but his plaintive incomprehension when the two finally do go to bed encapsulated my frustration at the writing – Bonneville’s Lewis feels like an absurd fantasy of somebody whose rare gifts (and to be fair, childhood trauma) have separated him from worldly concerns.
Clearly the real Lewis wasn’t some massive horndog. But the man had had sex! Showing him to have a complicated mind philosophically only goes so far if you basically deny him a libido because he seems more noble without one. Bonneville is dashing enough to inject a bit of sex appeal regardless, but I think Nicholson puts him on a weird, functionally virginal pedestal to the detriment of the play.
Rachel Kavanaugh’s production is a very elegant thing, with Peter McKintosh’s set based around handsome ranks of bookshelves that intermingle with the odd Narnia allusion, most notably a Victorian-style lamp-post that sprouts from the stage, incongruous and unremarked upon.
None of it serves to quicken the pulse, really: it’s high class MOR, a chaste romantic fantasy that plays great with the Bonneville stans but is lacking a layer of depth. Still, even if I couldn’t exactly believe in the couple, I could still root for them.
