The drama of love and loss in Shadowlands has played out movingly in film and on television. William Nicholson’s take on CS Lewis’s marriage to an American divorcee is that of late-found passion, terminal illness and a crisis of the celebrated writer’s Christian faith. In all its iterations, it is an old-fashioned weepie. In this production, originally staged at Chichester Festival theatre, it just feels old-fashioned.
It has charm and pulls you into its sadness but seems as creaky as the half-filled, wood-panelled library in its backdrop. There is too much a sense of a drama unfolding, from the moment Lewis (Hugh Bonneville) receives a letter from American fan, Joy Davidman (Maggie Siff), to his slow falling in love and her descent into illness.
Directed by Rachel Kavanaugh, it plods from one scene to the next, sleepy in pace and action but breezy in its emotions. The loves story seems to sit apart from the thoughts on faith and suffering that Lewis voices at university podium lectures.
Bonneville is a lovely presence, as always, and he certainly knows how to play emotionally reserved men (there has been the Earl of Grantham in Downton Abbey and the cautious dad from Paddington). But although he channels awkwardness with aplomb, he lacks the hard, anguished depths that show Lewis’s stunting shyness and repression. He also emanates warmth, carrying an almost physical sense that he is, for all Lewis’s inhibitions, a big (bear) hug of a presence on stage. Siff is excellent as Joy, bringing sharp edges and ardour but the chemistry between them is just too fond and gentle.
Lewis’s fellow dons at Oxford University are cardboard characters, mouthing viewpoints on God, women – and Joy, whom they regard as an aggressive American – while Peter McKintosh’s set design does little to build this world and bring it to life. It leaves a vacuum in atmosphere, the stage woefully empty.
There are some scenes that penetrate, especially the exhilarating moment that Lewis and Joy declare their love for each other, circling around the other. The rapport between Lewis and his older brother (Jeff Rawle) with whom he lives, is amusing as well. But as a story of love and grief, it should have you in bits. Love found, so late, an emotionally remote man thawed by it, and then lost again, his love an open wound. It does not feel as eviscerating as it should.
Nicholson’s script is adapted from his own Bafta award-winning TV film and that is just what it feels like here: a made for TV tear-jerker.
• At Aldwych theatre, London, until 9 May
• This article was amended on 16 February 2026. An earlier version suggested that CS Lewis was English; however, the author was born in Belfast.
