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Wessex on Screen: Shadowlands

Shadowlands is a 1985 BBC TV movie written by William Nicholson that was later adapted as a 1989 stage play, and then a 1993 cinema film starring Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger. The stage play debuted at the Theatre Royal in Plymouth, before transferring to the West End and Broadway.

All three versions tell the story of Oxford don CS Lewis, and his surprising relationship with American divorcee Joy Gresham after a lifetime of bachelorhood. It was based largely on Lewis’s book A Grief Observed, which details his reaction to Gresham’s subsequent death from cancer, and his struggle to reconcile his Christian faith with her suffering.

The stage version remains a perennial favourite of amateur dramatic groups to this day, perhaps due to the universality of its theme of bereavement. The film version has a 97% rating on the review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes at the time of writing.

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