In Search of a Healing Magic

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

SHADOWLANDS by William Nicholson

For almost every person of religious conviction, the most harrowing test of faith comes with the suffering and death of a loved one. It is hard to believe in a just and kind God who allows innocent people to suffer the physical agonies of dying or the mental agonies of being parted. Yet it is precisely at these moments that religious belief can be most comforting. Being sure that apparently pointless grief does serve some higher purpose, even if one cannot yet divine what it is, may enable a depressed mourner to get himself through the despondency of the day.

That metaphysical dilemma lies at the heart of Shadowlands, a new Broadway play that personalizes the issue in the life of Clive Staples Lewis, a distinguished literary scholar and one of the 20th century's foremost popular writers on Christian theology. When Lewis was nine, his mother died of cancer. When he was 61, his wife Joy died of the same disease. Both were racked with pain; both endured the false hope of brief remission; both left behind baffled, brittle sons. Part of Lewis plainly believed these horrors somehow reflected the Almighty's benevolent hand. Another part of him, the play argues, never could. That led him to escape into writing another kind of literature for which he is remembered: children's fables such as The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. He yearned, it is suggested, for a healing magic he could not find in the everyday world.

Writers' lives rarely yield good drama. Their work is mostly done silently and alone. They live out their fantasies more openly on the page than in company. They often thwart relationships with others because they view everyone as "material." Shadowlands might seem doubly doomed because it also embraces disease-of-the-week pathos of a kind that TV generally does better. The plot focuses almost entirely on Lewis' relationship with Joy, whom he met and married -- less to live as man and wife than to enable her and her offspring by a prior marriage to stay in Britain -- after a half-century of hearty bachelorhood. The script is far more graphic about her symptoms (her hip "snapped like a frozen twig") than about whether this marriage of convenience ripened into sexual love, and its over-all view of Lewis as a near monk clashes with a recent biography. Moreover, the play is lumbered with Lewis' fellow Oxford dons, middle-aged men joking about women in an awed, distant, prepubescent way that may resonate for audiences in London, where the show originated, but does not for American theatergoers.

Yet Shadowlands does work. William Nicholson, adapting his 1984 TV drama, finds a wealth of delicate metaphor in the imagery of the title, a reference to Lewis' assertion that true life is inner life or afterlife and what happens on earth a mere shadow existence. He prospers by Jane Alexander's blunt, practical, meticulously underplayed Joy and by Nigel Hawthorne's epic performance, reminiscent of Ralph Richardson at his finest, as Lewis. Shuffling and shambling, looking as if forever surrounded by muddy acres and faithful hounds, Hawthorne is the embodiment of an older, surer England coming to grips with a new world that is not so much brave as demanding of bravery. He makes theological abstractions breathe -- and weep.