Unmissable drama

I was lucky enough to see Shadowlands at the Wyndham’s Theatre this week and, if you haven’t been, you really should.  William Nicholson’s play, originally a TV drama now best known for the movie version starring Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger, is powerful stuff, a demanding distillation of C.S. Lewis’s personal battle with the problem of theodicy: why does a supposedly loving God allow suffering? Charles Dance and Janie Dee are great as Lewis and Joy Gresham, the American divorcee with whom the ultimate Oxford bachelor found himself hopelessly in love and whom he nursed as she died from cancer. There are also fabulous performances from John Standing as Professor Christopher Riley and Richard Durden as Lewis’s brother, Warnie. The atmosphere of an Oxford college of the era – medieval, misogynistic, yet full of repressed brotherhood and emotion – is superbly evoked, and forms the essential backdrop to the unfolding drama of the doomed love between Lewis and Joy.