What a quietly mighty play Shadowlands (1989) is.
William Nicholson’s affecting modern classic sees a particular type of repressed Englishness blown apart by love and grief, as the writer CS Lewis falls for Joy Gresham, an American divorcée 17 years his junior.
These parts are absolute gifts for actors and they are impressively filled by Hugh Bonneville and, especially, Liz White.
Rachel Kavanaugh’s admirably supple production keeps the action flowing smoothly over the book-lined set, confidently evoking without getting bogged down in the rarefied, or perhaps even ossified, world of all-male Oxford academia in which Lewis (Bonneville) operates.
The one type of literacy these learned environs lack is the emotional kind, which makes the arrival of Joy (White) such a vivid blast of energy whirling through hidebound lives.
White beautifully captures Gresham as a warmly appealing life force. I defy anyone not to sniffle quietly at what fate has in store for her and Lewis.
Bonneville, as we might expect from his work in Downton Abbey, Paddington and the like, is full of smooth, occasionally ruffled, very English charm, but he doesn’t quite have the range to convey the full measure of Lewis’s startling late-life transformation. He needs to dig deeper to find the eviscerating emotion that Anthony Hopkins brought to the part in the superlative 1993 film.
There’s lovely support from Andrew Havill as Lewis’s brisk but kindly bachelor brother Warnie. Impressive.
Until May 25 (01243 781312, cft.org.uk)
