I SHOULD first declare a lack of interest in the writings of C.S. Lewis, the Oxford don who wrote several volumes of philosophical Christian apologetics, as well as children's books in which the gospel of well-bred Anglican Christianity is embedded in science fiction-like allegory.

Whilliam Nicholson's play Shadowlands at the Queens theatre tells the story of Lewis's encounter in late middle-age with Joy Davidman, an American admirer whose letters had intrigued him. When she visits the timid bachelor in Oxford, a friendship develops. Soon after he has gone through a form of marriage with her at a registry office in order to get her a British passport, she develops cancer.

Once she is bed-ridden, dying, and no longer sexually threatening, Lewis realises he loves her. They marry again, in church , but after a period of remission her illness returns and she dies.

The play begins with Lewis delivering a simplistic lecture, which at no point rises above the level of the average vicar's sermon, on suffering; a subject on which he is insufferable.

The unanswerable (if not unaskable) question, "Why does God allow suffering?" is in fact the playwright's theme": one which he develops at some length and in singularly flat, undramatic dialogue which too easily resorts to unctuous religiosity.

I fear that C.S. Lewis's conversation with his fellow-dons, whom we meet at high table and in the quad, may well have sounded precisely like this, but it makes for a tediously enervating theatrical experience. By far the best lines in the play are those of the two wedding ceremonies, secular in Act I and religious in Act II.

In its original version on TV, the dullness of Nicholson's play may well have been lessened by imaginative direction, clever camera angles and the like. But, deprived of a camera, there is little that Elijah Mashinsky's intelligent and sensitive direction, or Brian Harris's imaginative lighting, can do to alleviate the tedium.

Nigel Hawthorne, who is beginning to acquire the personality and mannerisms of the late Ralph Richardson, presents Lewis as a churchy, donnish character which sounds just about right. That consummate actress Jane Lapotaire has no difficulties with Joy Davidman; it is hardly her fault that, like Charles II, she is an unconcionable time dying. The most sympathetic character is Lewis's brother Warnie, beautifully played by Geoffrey Toone.