PATRICK MARMION’s first night time assessment of Shadowlands at London’s Aldwych Theatre: Downton’s Hugh Bonneville on a journey of heartbreak and hope
You can bank on Hugh Bonneville. He is a warm, solid incarnation of bashful, faintly grumpy Britishness. The cuddly star of Downton and Paddington sets you up for the day like a full English breakfast.
And here he goes again as CS Lewis, the great writer of the Narnia stories – a reclusive, emotionally stunted, 50-something Oxford don who sought refuge in tweeds, literature and the church.
Yet the real star of this West End transfer of Chichester Festival Theatre’s 2019 revival of William Nicholson’s biographical drama is Maggie Siff (pictured with Hugh), best known as Damian Lewis’s shrink Wendy in TV’s Billions.
She plays Joy Davidman, the interloping American who turned Lewis’s world of dusty regimentation and closeted, anti-American misogyny upside down.
She does it not by driving a horse and cart through ancient college protocols, but through quietly determined love and progressive cups of tea. Resistance is great, not least from Lewis’s jaundiced fellow Oxford don Christopher Riley, who moans about Americans not understanding English inhibition.
She bats him off as either ‘offensive or merely stupid’, and Lewis finds himself enchanted by the light and colour she brings to his life.
(l-r) Jeff Rawle, Hugh Bonneville, Maggie Siff, Ayrton English and Timothy Watson bow at the curtain call during the press night performance of Shadowlands at The Aldwych Theatre
You can bank on Hugh Bonneville. He is a warm, solid incarnation of bashful, faintly grumpy Britishness, writes Patrick Marmion
But tragedy awaits with a diagnosis of terminal cancer, in a play asking why God allows suffering. In a series of soliloquy-lectures to students, Lewis asks if God uses suffering as a megaphone to rouse the spiritually deaf, or if he’s actually a ‘cosmic vivisectionist’.
Unashamedly pondering such big questions, the play does so with thoughtful wit and, astonishingly in Rachel Kavanaugh’s nostalgic production, a modest amount of spectacle.
Yards and yards of tall, dreaming bookcases yield to a vision of Narnia beyond, suggesting an afterlife.
And while Bonneville is a dependable old stick in whom we trust, as we join him on his journey through faith and despair, it’s Siff he has to thank for lighting up both his character and the stage.
Next stop Broadway?
