”How’s the pain, Joy?” “Only shadows, Jack.”

[breakinglight11]

Finally got around to checking out William Nicholson’s play Shadowlands, a dramatization of the process of C.S. Lewis falling in love with his wife Joy Davidman Gresham, and dealing with her eventual death of cancer just a few years later. It was sweet and sad and I quite enjoyed it, to the point where I wonder if my long-standing interest in the subject matter might have biased me. But I thought it was quite good, with strong characterizations, excellent dialogue, and lots of lovely little touches that came from an understanding of the actual historical people’s lives. A Grief Observed, a clear inspiration for the work, is one of my favorite pieces of Lewis’s; it was important to me both in dealing with my grief over my mother’s death, and with my own struggles to remain hopeful in the face of pain. So I may be a bit inclined to like it, but I still thought it was good on its own merits.

The only real critique I have of it are that the ending feels a bit rushed; it does touch on how the loss of Davidman shook Lewis’s faith for a time, and he had to rebuild it, but I thought it got to that rebuilt place a bit faster than made sense. Also, there was a moment that didn’t work for me if only because it contradicted an explicit point made in A Grief Observed. There’s a scene where Lewis’s older brother Warren encourages him to speak to his stepson about their shared sorrow over the loss of Davidman. It’s a pretty well-written scene, and I can see why the writer felt it was narratively necessary, but it bugged me because Lewis explicitly says in the memoir that he attempted to talk to the young sons she left behind about it, and it was so uncomfortable for all of them that he quit trying. The scene in the play has that moment go way better than he describes it, and while I get it was a dramatization rather than a biography, it still rang false to me.

My favorite part of the construction was the way it intertwined the story with Lewis’s wrangling with the subject that most preoccupied him in his theological life— what he called “the problem of pain,” the question of how a God that loves us can allow pain in the world. If you’re going to write about Lewis as a character and capture anything true about him, that really does have to be part of his personal struggle, and I thought the play incorporated it well. It also drove home an understanding I always felt was necessary to get Lewis and his work— that this is a man who hurt —because nobody would become so obsessed with that question unless they had a lot of suffering they needed to make sense of.

”How’s the pain, Joy?” “Only shadows, Jack.”