At the end of CS Lewis’s classic Narnia series [spoiler alert], the children find out that they’ve died in the real world – and that the magical land they’ve been having such wonderful adventures in is actually a version of heaven, where they’ll live for ever. If you find that idea at all disconcerting or mawkish, then don’t dream of setting foot in the heavily moralistic, intensely sentimental world of film-turned-play Shadowlands. It opens with a gown-clad Lewis sermonising that real life is a shadowy land compared with the golden rewards after. Then, it shows him testing his faith to its limits, when his late-blooming love affair takes a tragic turn.
Television’s favourite nicely brought up Englishman Hugh Bonneville (Downton Abbey, Paddington) brings plenty of affable charm to this devout, emotionally repressed character, but neither this sanitised production nor his unstintingly mild-mannered performance can capture the darker realities of grief, sex and mortality.
