The impetus to revive William Nicholson’s sturdy 1989 play about the late romantic and spiritual upheaval of author CS Lewis’s life is pretty clear. It’s a perfect vehicle for the rumpled decency of Hugh Bonneville that pairs him – a la Downton – with a feisty American female. Maggie Siff, who brought some forceful gender balance to testosterone-led TV shows Mad Men, Sons of Anarchy and Billions, plays the New York poet Joy Davidman, who belatedly opens Lewis’s eyes to a life beyond God and bachelorhood; and beyond literature, witches and wardrobes.
Rachel Kavanaugh’s handsome, old-school production - originally staged at Chichester in 2019 with Bonneville but without Siff - features comfortably assured performances from the two leads and the supporting cast. But the play’s emotional impact has dulled over the years. My guest, who warned me she’d cried buckets over the 1993 film version, remained dry-eyed.
Best known for his Narnia books for children, Lewis was an Eng Lit Oxford don and a lay theologian who wrote and lectured on the thorny issue of God’s tolerance, or infliction, of suffering. Nicholson suggests he lived a sexless and almost exclusively male life, sharing a house with his brother Warnie (amusingly dufferish Jeff Rawle), a soldier and military historian, and sharing philosophical and often chauvinistic banter over port with his fellow academics. (The fact that the mother and sister of a friend of Lewis’s killed in WWI also lived in the house is conveniently ignored.)
But then in his 50s Joy bursts into his life - talk about nominative determinism - announcing herself by shouting to a packed tearoom: “Anyone here called Lewis?!” Born Jewish, turned communist, then converted to Christianity, she is a gifted creative intellect with a young son in tow (in reality she had two) and is hurtling toward a second divorce, from a violent, philandering alcoholic. All of which is a challenge to Lewis’s fuddy-duddy college life and the ecumenical but strict Christianity he embraced as an adult.
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Siff brings verve and vigour to the way Joy challenges his assumptions and the rhetorical techniques he uses to buttress them, and her disruption of the Oxford boys’ club. When an etiolated misogynist prof (Timothy Watson) tries to dominate her in conversation she politely eviscerates him: “Are you being offensive or merely stupid.” Her acid wit cuts through the benign, battened-down reserve of Bonneville’s Lewis. When she makes clear her attraction to him he’s baffled and embarrassed, though he marries her (“technically”) to secure her citizenship.
Nicholson implies Lewis was emotionally neutered, having bricked up his feelings after his mother’s death from cancer when he was eight or nine. And it’s surely not too much of a spoiler to say that Davidman’s own sudden affliction with terminal bone cancer – in an always-harrowing scene before the interval - changes everything. He can no longer see their relationship as purely platonic, nor view God as a sculptor whose hammer blows bring humanity to perfection.
The play deals in stark, obvious opposites. Pain versus pleasure. British repression versus Yankee straight-talking. The “shadowlands” of this world versus the supposed bliss of the next. The question of faith looms as large as the love story, but it’s debated in a very civilised way, which is one reason why the play feels old-fashioned – religion having once again become thoroughly weaponised today. The Oxford setting (Lewis actually mentions “dreaming spires and all that”) and the self-conscious references to the literary canon add to the fustiness.
Kavanaugh wisely doesn’t try to revamp things. Her production, clad in shades of brown, black and grey, unfolds in measured fashion against Peter McKintosh’s set of lofty library shelves. Bonneville, who seems always to be putting on or taking off a raincoat or a dressing gown here, is a perfect fit for Nicholson’s avuncular, slightly pompous Lewis. Siff is similarly right for the beady-eyed, passionate Joy. Their relationship convinced but never quite moved me. This feels like a piece of heritage theatre, albeit one mounted with star power and skill.
To 9 May - buy tickets here
