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Written
by
William
Nicholson
Director
Michael
Barker-Caven
Designer
Michael Wright
C.S
Lewis
Charles Dance
Joy
Gresham
Janie Dee
Major
W.H Lewis
Richard Durden
Prof.
Christopher Riley
John Standing
Dr Maurice
Oakley
Osmund Bullock
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Wyndham's
Theatre
3 Oct - 15 Dec 2007 |
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Mid-way
through the first half of
this new staging of William
Nicholson's Shadowlands,
C.S Lewis' wife-to-be Joy
Gresham, quotes from The
Love Song
of J. Alfred Prufrock, in
which T.S Eliot's celibate
hero ponders his amatory potential
and reluctance to exploit
it. The reference is almost
painfully apposite, for Lewis
was himself a life-long bachelor
up until this point. Eventually,
the lion in winter dared to
escape his inhibitions. He
fell in love with Gresham
- a capitulation galvanised
and made more poignant by
her (then, all too evident)
mortality. Despite a brief
remission, she was to die
of cancer within a few years
of their marriage.
The playwright freely admits
that he empathised with the
commitment-phobic, repressed
and intellectual figure of
Lewis - who incidentally,
tutored his mother at Oxford.
His construct turns on the
Damoscene conversion of an
introvert writer who, in advanced
middle-age, finally allows
himself both to love, and
to own his feelings - arguably
in an unexpected and uniquely
(un-) English way. Quasi-tragic,
it is tear-jerking stuff:
neverthless, when, as at the
end of the second act, Lewis'
grief is so very all-consuming,
we must acknowledge a certain
weakness of character. He
is understandably complexed
from the premature death of
his own mother from cancer
at nine years of age and therefore
relates to his stepson, Douglas,
now that the boy has undergone
a similar loss. One is reluctant
to posit the subject of maternal
hang-ups, but cannot help
wishing that he had had the
emotional resources to experience
happiness with women in more
formative years.
This is but to cavil, for
the flights of fancy that
constitute good theatre are
merely means to an end. Quite
simply, as Lewis, Charles
Dance is a revelation. Gone
are the matinee idol looks
of yesteryear; but the broken,
world-weary husk of brilliance
which must have characterised
the latter days of the commited
christian creator of the Narnia
Chronicles is consummately
conjoured by the actor. As
orator, college confidante
or dilatory lover, he inhabits
the man. His unlikely passion
for Janie Dee's brainy misfit,
Gresham, is - against the
odds - credible, right down
to the signature rattling
of change-filled pockets at
moments of (unbearable) intimacy.
His constipated brother, the
Major, is bravely inhabited
by Richard Durden. Despite
initial misgivings prompted
by bombast and boorishness,
Durden endears. Dee's pin-neat,
yankie blue-stocking of a
portrayal is a slow-burning
perfomance which burgeons
as Joy diminishes. Relegated
to second fiddle, she assumes
quiet pre-eminence on her
death-bed.
The simple stage setting of
mobile library shelves gives
way twice to glimpses of a
glorious Narnia wardrobe-world
at the behest of the young
son Douglas' imaginings. From
the second, sun-lit vista,
he plucks the fictional apple
of his step-fathers's creation,
but alas it fails to allay
his mothers decline in harsh
reality. Incredibly, this
and other heart-stopping episodes,
never descend into cloying
sentimentality - a credit
to both text and cast.
With little to go on by way
of biographic record, the
play is very much an invented
interpretation of the author's
declining years. Nonethless,
it is both engrossing and
plausible in this searing
production. As a matter of
record, coming 'closer to
the truth than anything else'
that the adult Douglas Gresham
admitted reading about his
mother's distinguished second
husband. Life's indeterminate
'shadowlands' (which Lewis
had alluded to in the Chronicles)
are transformed all too briefly
through the unworldly magic
of love - overwhelming him
before our eyes. In the play's
only direct quotation we learn
that 'pain is God's megaphone
to rouse a deaf world'. In
extremis, Dance rails convincingly
against a 'vivisectionist'
Lord to whom we are but 'rats
in a cosmic laboratory'. His
faith challenged beyond endurance,
we are left convinced that
he will never get over the
bitter-sweet, belated bennison
manifested by Gresham - a
salutary lesson reinforced
by his death barely four years
later.
Caroline
Kellett Fraysse |
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