NOT having been able to get through more than 25 pages of The Screwtape Letters, I felt less than enthusiastic about facing an account of the love affair of the Oxford academic, C S Lewis, and an America poetess, Joy Davidman.

When Nigel Hawthorne as Lewis, bounces onto the stage dressed in crumpled corduroys, and asks the unanswerable question: "If God loves us, why does he allow us to sufer so much?", my expectations of an evening of chummy Christianity seemed about to be confirmed.

Fortunately, Shadowlands, by William Nicholson at the Queens, is less a proselytising statement of the Christian dilemma and more an examination of how love can breach the deferences of even the most sceptical and resistant of hearts.

Because Lewis, already a well-known author, was amused by the letters he received about his work from Joy Davidman, a New York Jewess turned Christian, he agreed to have tea with her and her son at an Oxford hotel in the early Fifties.

Guessing incorrectly that she would be short, dumpy, no beauty and a predator, he took along for his protectionhis elderly brother, with whom he shared an Oxford residence.

The earth did not stop still when they met. On the contrary, Lewis was not particularly taken with her pushy American ways and felt safe because she was firmly married to a husband in New York.

Although his fellow-dons never liked her, Lewis slowly fell under her spell and when, a year later, she returned to Oxford after a divorce, he became her close friend and to give her residential qualifications to stay in England, went through a technical marriage with her.

William Niholson's dialogue perfectly captures their drab marriage ceremony in a registrar's office, followed by Lewis's embarassed retreat from any sexual obligations, even Jane Lapotaire's engaging looks as Joy could not seriously undermine his dedicated bachelorhood.

But when cancer hospitalises her, Lewis realises the depth of his need for her.

The only answer he has to God's cruelty to lovers and children is that we need suffering to prepare us for another world because we are only shadows in this one. But will we suffer, too, in the next world and will pain be our lot for eternity? The secret remains locked.

Nigel Hawthorne's depiction of the growing dependence of Lewis upon Joy, his overflowing happiness at discovering love for the first time and his agonising despair at losing it, is unbearably moving: It is a performance that threads nuances between great joy and utter misery.

Jane Lapotaire has the assertive bounce of an American intellectual determined not to be over-awed by the condescension of Oxford academics. When she has to cope with her excrutitating agony and her conviction that we exist only in a shadowland, she makes us cry at the wonder of our own mortality.

Always in danger of topling over into sentimental bathos, Nicholson's blend of high table intellectual ricalry and Elijah Moshinsky's sensitive direction gives the subject a gravitas that lifts it avove just a spiritual weepie.