C.S. Lewis Revealed

'Shadowlands' uncovers the passion and pain of this unlikely Broadway protagonist

by Allan Wallach. Newday, 1990

IF GOD LOVES US," C. S. Lewis asks in a radio talk at the beginning of "Shadowlands," "why does He allow us to suffer so much?"

His answer is an attempt to bring solace to the troubled. "Pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world," he says. Only through suffering do we come to know that "our true good lies in another world," that the one we inhabit "is no more than the shadowlands."

The Lewis character circles back to this subject twice during the play, each time sounding less certain pain is part of God's plan. He has come to know suffering.

William Nicholson, the British author of "Shadowlands," which opens today at the Brooks Atkinson Theater after a successful run in London's West End, says the Lewis of his play is "a man who cannot commit himself to loving somebody because of the fear that that might cause pain later." But during the course of the play, the emotionally constricted man is transformed by his love for Joy Davidman.

C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) seems on the surface an unlikely protagonist for a Broadway play. He spent most of his adult years as an Oxford don, his life centered on a literary group known as the Inklings, whose other well-known member (not mentioned by name in the play) was his friend J. R. R. Tolkien, author of "The Hobbit" and other books. Lewis, an atheist who turned to Christianity, achieved wide fame for his accessible books on religious subjects ("The Screwtape Letters," "Mere Christianity") and for the morally instructive "Chronicles of Narnia" children's series. His prolific output also included scholarly works and a sci-fi trilogy.

The woman he came to love was an American writer with two sons (only one in the play) and a philandering husband she was in the process of divorcing. She and Lewis married for convenience: Needing a husband so she could remain in England, she asked Lewis, whom she'd met when he was in his 50s and she in her 30s.

"What I'm trying to do," Nicholson said, "is to capture on stage that extraordinary process between two very unlikely people that causes them to end up passionately in love with each other." That process was intensified by the discovery that Davidman had cancer. She died in 1960, after a scant four years of marriage. Lewis' pain was reflected in his most moving book, "A Grief Observed," published under a pseudonym.

Nicholson, a documentary film maker working for the BBC, had no interest in Lewis at first. His mother, who'd been taught by Lewis at Oxford, disliked him and kept none of his books in the house. Nicholson didn't respond to those he read elsewhere.

But because of his background as an English scholar at Cambridge with an interest in religious subjects, he was commissioned in 1983 to write a television film about the Lewis-Davidman love story. When he reluctantly began doing research on Lewis, he found himself "neither liking him nor respecting him," Nicholson said during a recent New York visit.

"But then I read some more, and I started feeling that here is essentially a very honest man with a lot of problems which he couldn't work through but knew he had. And outside events attacked him and made him work through them. And I started to be sympathetic for that reason. Then, in the light of that, I started reading more of his work, and I started to admire him. And by the time I was actually writing, I felt very close to him indeed."

He wrote the BBC-TV "Shadowlands" (seen here on PBS) in only three weeks. "I just sat down, and it all came flooding out of me," Nicholson said. "And what I was writing about was a man who wanted to love but couldn't, and a woman who wanted to be loved but realized it wasn't going to work and was having to deal with that. A situation I was really familiar with in my own life. . .

"The most powerful bits of the play really are the emotion when it's released. And I think what was happening was I was releasing in me emotion that I wasn't able to put into my own personal affairs. Because I didn't want commitment, I didn't want responsibility - a very common situation: the eternal teenager, you know."

Did working on the story make Nicholson himself open to commitment? He can't say. But at 42, he's now married and a father. He feels himself "a completely different person" from the one who wrote the TV drama seven years ago.

And though the stage version - his first play - covers much the same ground, he calls it "almost a new play," with intellectual and theological material he couldn't include in the TV movie. Nicholson believes that material is, to say the least, unusual for the stage. "This isn't subsidized theater; this isn't the Royal Shakespeare Company," he said. "It's commercial West End London theater, and it starts with a Please turn the page Continued seven-minute theological monologue."

Still, attendance grew steadily in the opening months in the West End, evidently fed by word of mouth - despite the fact that most people went with little or no knowledge of C. S. Lewis and Joy Davidman. "There is planted in the early scenes just enough basic information for you to walk into that play knowing nothing," Nicholson said.

Nigel Hawthorne, who originated the part of Lewis in London, is recreating it here. "What he does on stage is amazing," the playwright said. "You take somebody who you start off thinking is a bit of joke, this uptight, comic man, and by the end he's breaking your heart with what he's feeling onstage, night after night, eight times a week."

Jane Alexander, who took over as Joy Davidman in London, gives the part a rather different tone from her predecessor, Jane Lapotaire, he said. She has a lovable quality at first and a "hard gentleness in the dying scene," in Nicholson's view.

Much of the background in A. N. Wilson's recent biography of Lewis and in earlier ones is not to be found in the play. Audiences will not learn, for instance, that Lewis' emotional aridity had to do with the events surrounding his mother's death when he was a boy in Belfast, or that he spent a good many years in an odd living arrangement with an older woman he called his "second mother."

Nicholson, however, believes comprehensiveness is not possible - or even desirable - in a two-hour play. "You go to an evening at the theater," he said, "to catch the spirit and emotions of those people, and a point in their lives brought to life."

His central characters emerge softer than in Wilson's biography, which terms Lewis a verbal bully and Davidman abrasive. Nicholson, however, doesn't pretend to be presenting photographic reality. "What I'm actually creating," he said, "are characters who are kind of parallel to the real people. Of course they're not the real people. They are a kind of dramatized construct, which gives you, I hope, some of the feeling of the real people, but more important, makes characters that live on the stage for those two hours.

"And that's what I really care about. I want people to come out of the theater not saying, `Now I know more about C. S. Lewis' but, `Now I know more about myself.' "