Financial Times 24.10.89 Martin Hoyle William Nicholson's study of the late emotional blossoming of C.S. Lewis, and his unlikely marriage to and American divorcee, was reportedly moving in its original television form with Josh Ackland and Claire Bloom. Translated to the stage in a beautifully smooth production with a pair of strenuously, ingratiating players, it comes over at best as a civilised evening's entertainment, at worst as a stagey lightweight aspiring to intellectual and spiritual gravitas. The spilt is epitomised by Nigel Hawthorne's performance as C.S. Lewis. A bantamweight if ever there was one, Mr Hawthorne opens the proceedings by bounding before the beautiful astragalled screen, a Japanese wall-cum-vast window, that fronts the stage to deliver in cheerful man-to-man tones a lecture on "pain, love and suffering". He comes perilously near Alan Bennett's housemaster giving a pi-jaw; then settles for generalised donnishness except when he is playing Sir Michael Hordern. Lewis may have adopted a J.B. Priestley common-man approach in his books and talks on ethics and religion (his Screwtape Letters on the nature of evil was an improbably best-seller), but there was no doubt as to his intellectual prowess: a passionate devotee of Renaissance literature and convinced Christian, he was even approached by the BBC for a series of talks on right and wrong. These were a popular success. Today Jimmy Young and Gloria Hunniford are deemed caviare for the general. Joy Davidman, Christian Jewish ex-Leftie poet, wrote to Lewis as an American fan; met him on a trip to England; after a divorce from an unfaithful and violent alcoholic returned to stay; and married Lewis "technically", as he reassuringly defined it, for British citizenship. They kept seperate establishments, and it was only after she was stricken with bone cancer that he realised his love for her. A period of brief fragile bliss ensued for the 58-year-old Oxford academic before his wife's death. The play describes but does not illustrate. We never know why this bumbling bachelor falls in love, if not through pity; and Joy herself remains a monochrome figure despite Jane Lapotaire's grimly determined charm. That there was more to the character than a fixed brave smileand rueful wisecracks, is finally hinted at in the ambivalent attitudes of High Table (I'm damned if I'm going to start liking her just because she'd dead"); but she is allowed on the most unexceptionable aggressiveness (on egalitarianism, educational opportunities, English stuffiness) - nothing to ruffle the blandness of a six-Kleenex weepie. The actress gives no sign of how intelligent we are meant to assume Joy was; but gets a consistent accent, unlike Mr Hawthorne who overdoes the Oxford tones ("Shell we treat ourselves to a keb?") Elijah Moshinsky produces fluently on Mark Thompson's spare set: behind the screen the framework of a cube with receding perspective serves as study, home on hospital, ravishingly lit by Brian Harris, and dominated by an upstage wardrobe. This opens on magical occasions to reveal the milky moonlight and delicate peaks of Narnia, that enchanted country Lewis created for children. The Senior Common Room is well portrayed, without exaggeration; indeed, all the small parts are excellently done. Originating at the Theatre Royal, Plymouth, this is the sort of intelligent theatre that is becoming a rarely sighted species in the West End. For all its ultimate evasiveness, it deserves to flourish.