Shadowlands Review – Hugh Bonneville’s Magic in a Screaming Cry Like an Old Library | platform

TThe drama of love and loss in Shadowlands has played an influential role in film and television. William Nicholson’s view of C.S. Lewis’s marriage to an American divorcee is one of the famous writer’s belated passion, terminal illness, and crisis of Christian faith. In all its iterations, it’s good old-fashioned crying. In this production, originally staged at the Chichester Festival Theatre, it feels very old-fashioned.

It has charm and pulls you into its melancholy but it looks as creaky as the half-baked wood-paneled library in its background. There is plenty of sense of drama unfolding, from the moment Louis (Hugh Bonneville) receives a letter from American fan Joy Davidman (Maggie Siff), to his slow fall in love and her fall into illness.

Directed by Rachel Cavanaugh, the film moves from one scene to the next, calm in its pace and movement but breezy in its emotions. The love story seems disconnected from the ideas about faith and suffering that Lewis expresses in his university platform lectures.

Bonneville is a lovely presence, as always, and certainly knows how to play the emotionally reserved Englishman (there was the Earl of Grantham in Downton Abbey and the wary father from Paddington). But although he channels the embarrassment with aplomb, it lacks the harsh depths and agony that demonstrate Lewis’ extreme shyness and repression. It’s also a warming, almost physical feeling that, for all Lewis’s inhibitions, is a great embrace for the stage presence. Siff is excellent as Joy, bringing a sharp edge and enthusiasm but their chemistry is so loving and sweet.

Lewis’s Oxford classmates are cardboard characters, spouting views on God, women – and Joy, whom they regard as an aggressive American – while Peter Mackintosh’s design does little to build this world and bring it to life. It leaves a void in the atmosphere, and the stage is woefully empty.

there some Scenes are penetrating, especially the delightful moment in which Louis and Joey declare their love for each other, circling each other. The relationship between Louis and his older brother (Jeff Rawle), who lives with him, is also interesting. But as a story of love and sadness, it should tear you apart. He found love, too late, an emotionally distant man, melted by love, then lost again, his love an open wound. It doesn’t feel as empty as it should.

Nicholson’s script is adapted from his BAFTA-winning TV movie, and that’s what it’s like here: a made-for-TV movie.