Love story to tug at the heart

SHADOWLANDS, Lyceum, Oldham

LYCEUM Players artistic directors Nigel Marland and Ean Burgon bow out of their roles after a five-year tenure with this play and frankly couldn’t be going on a higher note.

Though both might point to bigger-scale, showier or more enjoyable productions during their time, none have combined the beautifully-judged tone and pace, generally superb performances and classy script of William Nicholson’s story of academic and author CS “Jack” Lewis — of “Narnia” fame — and his American fan, Joy Gresham.

The play concerns the entry of young divorcee and poet Joy into the Fifties boys’ club of the older Lewis’s Oxford circle; their growing affection, blossoming love, and ultimate marriage.

What makes the tender little story a heart-rending true-life tragedy is that his realisation of their love was almost too late. The couple married after she had been diagnosed with incurable bone cancer and was expected soon to die.

Audience empathy grows even deeper when the new Mrs Lewis goes into significant remission, returning the pair to a relatively normal life, before dashing their happiness and leaving him distraught.

Through the devout Lewis’s writing and conversations, the play delves quite deeply into life, happiness and the purpose of faith; but above all this is a beautifully-realised romance, astonishingly well played by Burgon, as Lewis, and Lois Kelly as Gresham.

Ean Burgon appears to have cornered the Lyceum market in lonely bachelor roles, and here gives one of his best performances in a highly-believeable representation of growing happiness and greater sorrow.

Lois Kelly also surpasses her own very high standards as the good-humoured visitor, who implants her personality in Lewis’s life and hangs on to her will and determination to be happy in his company to the end. Both underplay beautifully; no histrionics, just Anglo-American pluck.

Supporting players, too, are very well cast in Sybil Murray’s terrific production: from the dry chumminess of John Weetman as Lewis’s brother and the waspishness of Julian Smith as fellow academic Riley, to little Thomas Douglas as Gresham’s young son. All are extremely believable and, in the case of Kelly and Douglas, sport spot-on US accents.

It is rare in amateur productions that one can forget the hobby status of the performers and fall headlong into a story, but this cast manages to make that possible in an elegiac, beautifully-paced story of love and loss.