HOW do you get inside the mind of CS Lewis?

The creator of the beloved Chronicles of Narnia stories was an author, an academic and a scholar, a historian and a theologian and, for the most part, an enigma. 

While pondering his own nature, Lewis is recorded to have said 'the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world'.

So while faced with the puzzle that is CS Lewis when he won the leading role in Shadowlands, veteran actor Stephen Boxer’s solution was 'an awful lot of reading'.

“I ploughed through quite a few of his books, but of course the joy of acting is that our main job is to play people who are much cleverer than we are, we just have to give the illusion,” says Boxer. “So some of it is craft and some of it is study.”

Boxer portrays Lewis in his days as a don at Oxford living a quiet life, when he meets American poet Joy Davidman, played by Amanda Ryan.

Feisty and uninhibited, intellectual sparring soon blossoms into romance between as each provide the other with a new outlook.

“It is William Nicholson’s take on a man who was highly cerebral,” says

Boxer. “He lives in this rather closeted, ivory towered, world. He takes the idea of this man whose senses are stormed by this brash, highly intelligent American woman who opens him up emotionally for the first time.”

But as their relationship develops it leads onto the questions of mortality and faith as Lewis’s notoriously strong Christian ideals are challenged when Joy is diagnosed with cancer.

The play opens with Lewis posing the question 'how can a supposedly loving, omnipotent God allow his creation to suffer?'

“You have him coming to terms with having found the meaning of life and then having to cope with its loss,” says Boxer. “What it challenges is his deep seated beliefs.”

Boxer himself experienced a bereavement while working on Shadowlands which only deepened his connection to the character and script.

He adds: “It deals with broad subjects to which I think everyone will be able to relate and which we all have to relate at some point, loss is something we will all experience.

“In fact while I was rehearsing this play a very good friend of mine was diagnosed with cancer and died within about six weeks, it was very shocking and quite galvanizing to me.”

But as CS Lewis is such a famed figure in British literature, Boxer is keen to draw the distinction between the man and the character.

“If I was doing a biopic I would have to have done a Robert De Niro, put on four stone, gone bald, and done a degree in theology,” says Boxer. “But It is not, thank god, it is a play.”

While the play deals with Lewis in the latter days of his life, Boxer came to the realisation he was only about two miles away from the author on the night he died in 1963.

“When I was 13 I went to the school which was attached to the college in Oxford where CS Lewis was a professor,” he says. “I was not aware at the time, but one day I was walking to school and I was stopped by this undergraduate who said ‘have you heard what happened?’.

“He did not say CS Lewis had died, but he said President Kennedy had been shot.

“Then when I was researching for this role and I found out C.S Lewis died that very same evening – I felt that was a strange little connection.”

While Boxer is perhaps best known for television roles such as in Doctors and Prime Suspect, he refers to working on the stage as 'soul food' and said he was 'desperate to get back and do some theatre'.

“I do not have a preference between the two, but what I love, and have been able to do over the past 30 years, is mixing them both,” says Boxer. “I just have had a whole dollop of television last year, and while most of it was enjoyable I was very keen to get back and this landed on my doorstep.

“But on the other hand I had not planned to be on the road for six months, but obviously I have no regrets, I love this play and I love the character.”

He adds he still looks fondly on his work in Doctors, recalling the cast becoming like a 'little theatre company' and saying he enjoyed playing football with the crew and technicians. 

“The thing that frustrates me most about television and film  is the lack of rehearsal culture,” he says. “What you are portraying is human chemistry and often it is not embraced how nuanced that is and how interesting it can be if you explore it.”

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