TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/111990/1119410.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 3.5 KB | 77 lines

                                                                                THEATER, Page 106

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 res onate 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.