Shadowlands theatre review: Hugh Bonneville grips in grief drama
Shadowlands theatre review and star rating: ★★★★
There are ample ways to soak up the Paddington movie franchise live in the capital right now. If you’re not going to listen to songs about “M-M-M-M-Marmalade” at Paddington the Musical, then why not invest in Hugh Bonneville, who returns to the London stage for the first time since 2004 and is arresting in this grief drama about the novelist CS Lewis and his later life love affair with American poet Joy Davidman.
Bonneville is a charming storyteller. On the surface, there is much about CS Lewis that you pull away from. His emotional detachment, how he pivots to academia as a social crutch. But the Downton Abbey actor is so good he could make you go gooey for Göring if he really flexxed.
Shadowlands is structured as a series of would-be lectures delivered by The Chronicles of Narnia author that draw on his theological research (Lewis’ 1940 book The Problem of Pain opens the show, from which Bonneville’s Lewis, pacing slowly, quotes that “pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world”). This is interspersed with scenes set in 1950s Oxford in which Lewis cohabits with his brother Wernie and hangs out with his waspish set in rooms full of towering bookshelves. After receiving a letter from Davidman in which she expresses her fascination with him, the Lewis brothers meet her for tea, slowly inviting her into the fold until Lewis (called “Jack” by his friends) and Davidson consider a later life love affair.
Shadowlands: theatre production charms
William Nicholson’s story was made into a 1993 film, 1989 West End and Tony Award nominated Broadway play, and 1985 television piece, and was revived for the Chichester Festival Theatre in 2019. Its formula of juxtaposing nuggets of pop theology (the odd line) with the story of his courtship is effective. Nicholson never asks you understand too much of the denser theories, but platforms just enough to effectively convey Lewis’ lifelong emotional stasis and isolatory tendencies. Courtship segments and bits with his stuffy academics are entertaining counterpoints to the compelling arc of Lewis’ slowly disrupted singledom. Bonneville is good at showing how Lewis could often show absolutely no emotion whatsoever at pivotal points. Mad Men’s Maggie Siff is effervescent as the full-bodied, emotional and extroverted Davidson.
Act 2 is lumpier and bumpier. The arc around Davidson’s illness feels clipped: Peter McKintosh’s minimal hospital setpieces, the short nature of those scenes and Rachel Kavanaugh’s speedy changes dull the potency of the emotion. It all feels too quick. That being said, Bonneville’s final state of the nation address and the beginnings of his grief journey hit a nerve. You wonder how this would come off without the stately Bonneville and Siff at the helm. That said, Shadowlands – that word itself is the idea that our lives are a “shadow” of our eternal lives to come – is one of many evocative backdrops sewn into this compelling human story.
Shadowlands plays at the Aldwych Theatre until 9 May 2026