Shadowlands

A revival of Shadowlands at the Aldwych Theatre arrives with reassuring star presence: Hugh Bonneville (recognisable from Downton Abbey and Paddington). Bonneville is eminently watchable and sympathetic throughout, perfectly balanced by Maggie Riff’s bright and fearless Joy. Rachel Kavanaugh shapes a production that slips past heritage comfort into something more attentive — a study of how emotional certainty loosens, almost against one’s will.

In William Nicholson’s drama, Oxford don and Christian intellectual C. S. Lewis encounters the incisive American writer Joy Davidman, newly arrived with her young son after escaping a destructive marriage. The early scenes are meticulously polite: tea poured, wit exchanged, arguments fenced with academic courtesy. The period’s casual sexism earns laughter precisely because it betrays the speakers’ complacency. Emotion exists only in implication. Rather than sudden confession, the play advances by abrasion — defences thinning line by line until intellect can no longer contain experience.

The production’s quiet confidence lies in its refusal to hurry. Conversations loop, digress and self-correct, and Kavanaugh lets the audience do the emotional work. When affection finally becomes visible, it feels less like a declaration than a shared realisation. The shift from academic sparring to mutual reliance is staged as something both comforting and terrifying: the discovery that one’s inner life has become dependent on another person.

The design is initially spare — book-lined suggestion rather than literal Oxford — but its most striking gesture arrives late. As Joy’s illness tightens its grip and her young son confronts the prospect of losing her, the walls open into a pale, otherworldly moonscape. The floor turns silvered, the space emptied of furniture and certainty, evoking the imaginative terrain Lewis gave children in his fiction. It is not illustrative so much as psychological: a child entering myth because reality has become unbearable. In that frozen landscape we are also made aware of Lewis’s own childhood bereavement echoing across time, adulthood collapsing into remembered helplessness. The fantasy world offers neither escape nor miracle, only a language large enough for fear.

Kavanaugh wisely resists sentimentality in the later scenes. Faith is interrogated rather than affirmed. Lewis’s public authority fractures under private experience he cannot categorise, and the production finds its power in hesitation — comfort offered badly, questions left hanging, humour used as armour. Grief appears not as grand tragedy but a brutal awakening. There is space for all our experiences of loss and illness here.

What lingers longest is the sense of parallel childhoods — the man who lost his mother, the boy about to — meeting in a shared imaginative space where certainty dissolves. Kavanaugh’s revival honours Nicholson’s intelligence by trusting understatement. It is thoughtful, tender theatre that moves quietly and settles deeply.