Charles is C.S. Lewis in play Shadowlands in 2007 and an interview

Before being a play.... Actors Charles Dance and Janie Dee have been cast in a charity reading of Shadowlands, to be performed at London’s Comedy Theatre on Dec. 10. 2006....The reading of William Nicholson’s drama, which won a 1990 Evening Standard Best Play Award, will be directed by The Sound of Music director Jeremy Sams.

"My co star Janie Dee and I did a rehearsed reading one night three or four months ago for a charity and it went down very well," Dance recalls. "Bill Nicholson was there and the producer who produced it on stage 20 years ago was also there. They approached us afterwards and said they wanted to do the play again. It is a beautifully constructed piece and, even though the subject matter is quite sad, it's also wonderfully witty at the same time."

The play follows the author's unexpected discovery of love at the age of 60 when he meets American poet and radical political thinker Joy Gresham - followed by the devastating blow when she contracts terminal cancer.

"They had this long correspondence and Lewis fell in love with her," says Dance. "It's really quite extraordinary for a man of 60 to experience love for the first time in his life. He was a devoutly Christian man and not long after he realised he was in love with this woman she has cancer and dies - and that makes him question his faith. There is this debate going on in his mind - why does a God of love allow this kind of thing to happen?"

Like many youngsters, Dance first discovered CS Lewis's magical world when he devoured his books as a child. But while he admires the man's writing, he is adamant that the story of his life stands alone as a thought-provoking and heart wrenching piece of theatre. So perfect was the script, he insists, that he found no need to carry out any further research into Lewis and his life.

"Bill Nicholson did an awful lot of work before writing this and, as far as I'm concerned, everything I need to play this part is in his script. Sure, I can go away and read numerous biographies and diaries about Lewis and find out what colour underwear he wore, but it's actually going to serve no purpose at all. My business is to present Bill's script in the most believable way I can. In a way it's unfortunate that the central character is called CS Lewis and that he is so well known, because I couldn't look less like CS Lewis if I tried. He was bald and rotund and I'm not like that at all. I would require major surgery to resemble Lewis but, as far as I'm concerned, that's not important - he could be Fred Smith and it would make no difference."

Set in Oxford in the 1950s, Shadowlands tells the true love story of CS Lewis (Dance) and Joy Gresham (Dee). Lewis, a leading Christian academic and author of many classic books including The Chronicles of Narnia, remained a bachelor until his fifties, when he met Joy. Enchanted by the American divorcee, he secretly married and cared for her when she became terminally ill. His encounter with love and loss led him to reconsider many of the beliefs he had previously held so staunchly.

First night critics seemed well and truly enchanted by this “powerful” revival of Nicholson’s thoughtful tearjerker, thanks largely to the lead actors. More than review described Charles Dance as a “revelation” in the role of CS Lewis, and none failed to be moved by his “beautifully quiet, understated performance”. 

Michael Coveney on Whatsonstage.com (three stars) :  Charles Dance, as CS Lewis, is something of a revelation...

Michael Billington in the Guardian (four stars) – “I found myself more moved this time round than by the 1989 production: partly because it is rare now to find a West End play that addresses the issue of mortality, and partly because of the quality of the acting … Dance, punctuating his speech with tiny snorts and giggles, and forever jangling the keys in his pockets, captures perfectly Lewis' emotional shyness … It is a beautifully quiet, understated performance; it is to Dance's credit he suggests the notion that earthly life is a mere shadowland offers scant consolation when confronted by a painful death … 

Charles Spencer in the Daily Telegraph - Charles Dance superbly captures that inarticulate diffidence that was once such an easily mocked feature of the English personality, but which is infinitely preferable to today’s sloppy emotionalism … What Dance magnificently captures, in fact, is a man belatedly discovering what it is to be fully human. Janie Dee is equally fine as his beloved Joy, bringing some welcome comedy and a delicious sense of mischief to the stage in a piece that could seem merely lachrymose, while also communicating the sharpness of her character’s suffering and the warmth of her heart.”

Nicholas de Jongh in the Evening Standard (four stars) – “What theatrical power survives in William Nicholson's famous, religious tear-jerker! It is, though, thanks to Charles Dance's extraordinarily moving performance that 17 years after its premiere, Shadowlands does not seem a trite piece of religious pleading … Dance takes to perfection the real-life role of the Oxford bachelor don, scholar and children's writer CS Lewis, who discovers love in his late fifties … Matthew Wright's expressionistic set, a room enclosed with towering, 14-feet high shelves of books that unfortunately look like dummies, suitably reeks of claustrophobia … Dance proves a revelation. He turns himself into a man ill at ease in his own body, adopting an awkward, lop-sided stance and bony gestures that betray the fact. He never cares or dares to catch Joy's eyes … He makes the worldly process of self-discovery, love and grief both exhilarating and overwhelmingly poignant.”

Benedict Nightingale in The Times (four stars) – “Last night one soon forgot Dance’s slimline glamour in one’s appreciation of a subtle, delicate account of a man waylaid by feelings he never knew he possessed. 

The most recent version has actor Charles Dance perhaps playing one of his most nuanced roles as well. Dance generally plays sophisticated, yet ethically troubled, or morally compromised individuals. In this role, his quite deliberately underplayed, restrained, portrayal of a man whose Christian faith is severely tested by the shock and loss of the premature death of a woman he gradually learned to deeply love. Dance adds to his speech telling, yet subtle. gestures and oral punctuations in the form of tiny snorts and slight giggles along with jangling keys in his pockets. He is emotionally and physically shaken. He captures C.S. Lewis's Oxbridge don's emotional, and often awkward, shyness elegantly.

Dance says as C.S. Lewis, "Why love if losing hurts so much? I have no answers any more. Only the life I have lived. Twice in that life I've been given the choice: as a boy and as a man. The boy chose safety, the man chooses suffering. The pain now is part of the happiness then. That's the deal." This is shared with the audience with eloquence and conviction.

http://www.berkshirefinearts.com/12-25-2007_shadowlands-at-london-s-wyndham-theatre.htm

The first major revival of the play, starring Charles Dance as Lewis and Janie Dee as Joy, premiered at Cambridge Arts Theatre on 5 September 2007 before touring the UK. The production, directed by Michael Barker-Carven, transferred to the Wyndham's Theatre on 3 October 2007 for an eleven-week season before transferring to the Novello Theatre where it ran from 21 December 2007 to 23 February 2008.

                 

Forty years on Charles Dance is still treading the boards. Lydia Slater salutes the old rogue

My first encounter with Charles Dance turns out to be a disconcerting experience. 'We've met before, darling,' he rumbles, ignoring my outstretched hand but shooting me a meaningful glance under his eyelids as he strides off to have his photo taken.

I am left hyperventilating in his wake. It's not just his personal magnetism, it's because I can't remember our paths having crossed. And Dance, the 6ft 3in star of Plenty, White Mischief and The Jewel in the Crown, is not easily forgotten. Cast into minor panic, I hastily ring my husband to ask him to look through my back catalogue of interviewees.

There is a weary sigh down the telephone. 'For God's sake,' says my spouse, 'that's the oldest chat-up line in the book.' Ooh, I do hope he's right. Dance may have just turned 61 but he has lost very little of his je ne sais quoi.

Well, having overcome the handicap of sandy hair to become one of Britain's major thespian heart-throbs (Princess Diana) famously picked him as her favourite actor, and hecdoes remind me faintly of a very handsome Prince Charles), mere age is not going to stand in his way. His fan club of self-styled Charlie's Angels is still going strong and organising mass expeditions to the theatre to see their hero at work. Whether they will enjoy Shadowlands or not is another matter.

For in order to play the emotionally constipated CS Lewis in this powerfully moving production of his doomed love affair, Dance has successfully rid himself of most of his sex appeal and sports a jacket with elbow patches and a head of grey hair into the bargain. Indeed, when I enter Dance's dressing room, the first thing I spot on his dressing table is a large bottle of grey hair dye. There is also a tatty fold-up mattress that forms an equally vital part of Dance's preparation - he has a little kip before embarking on the evening's blub-fest. 'If I'm tired, I get nervous to the point of f***ing up,' he says. 'It takes a lot of concentration, this part. It's quite a demanding play. 'Shadowlands is Dance's first major return to the stage since Long Day's Journey Into Night seven years ago, in which he starred opposite Jessica Lange, and which he says was 'also not a bundle of laughs - four hours of emotional shredding a night'. 

To be quite honest, he seems so lukewarm about the whole experience that you can't help but feel he might be regretting the role. ' I enjoy working in front of a camera better,' he confesses. 'A play takes over your life. I'm not one of those people who can potter about and do other things during the day. About 1pm, the thought comes to me, "Oh God, I've got to go into the theatre and climb this little mountain..."

It takes discipline. You have to live for the play.' So from now until mid- December, Dance will be living a hermit-like existence, sleeping as much as possible, seeing very few people and trying to do 'nothing of any consequence. Not long e-mails, not phone conversations. I don't want to involve myself in anything that would leave something other than the play in my mind. I just can't do it.' He doesn't drink because it makes him sleepy, and he can't even eat before a show because he says his energy is diverted to digesting. Surely, nightly hysterical weeping over a dying wife (twice if there's a matinee), combined with self imposed monastic seclusion during the day, must leave him feeling rather depressed. 'It costs,' he agrees, 'if one's going to do it properly. One accepts that before agreeing to do it. But it gives me an opportunity to exercise emotional and physical muscles that need to be exercised and one doesn't often get a chance to do that in front of a camera.'

He's back in London after a month touring the provinces ('foreplay before we penetrate the West End&' he drawls, raising a naughty eyebrow) and he didn't enjoy that either. 'Small-town England is the pits. The last date we played was Malvern [Worcestershire], and I was expecting a bohemian vibe about the place, but all the shops shut at 5pm and last orders in restaurants is 9.30pm. Bizarre,' he concludes. 'I'm not a big fan of the provinces. I regard myself as a Londoner.'

This might seem ironic, given that he was born in Redditch (also in Worcestershire) and brought up mostly in Plymouth, but his childhood doesn't seem to have been a terribly happy one, which perhaps accounts for his loathing for it. Despite his posh-sounding name and look of a Barbara Cartland aristocratic hero (aquiline nose, lazy eyelids, sardonic mouth, long legs and all the trimmings), Dance was born into very humble circumstances - 'common as muck' is how he describes it. His mother Nell was born in the East End and went into domestic service when she was just 13.'Blacking people's stoves,' says her son. 'She was below stairs.' For most of her working life, she was a nippy (waitress) at a Lyons Corner House. His father Walter, a civil engineer after whom Dance is named (he's actually Walter Charles), died from a perforated ulcer when Charles was four. So Nell married her lodger, a civil servant called Edward, who moved the family to Devon. Dance failed his eleven-plus, went to the local secondary modern in Plymouth, and eventually left school with two O levels and a terrible stammer, which arrived with the onset of puberty. 'That was just the way my adolescence manifested itself,' he says, stammering again as he recalls it. 'Other people get acne. I used to make up sentences to get round it. Maybe there was some emotional trauma in the deep recesses of my brain, but I don't know what.' It was only when the stammer vanished as mysteriously as it arrived that he remembered how much he'd enjoyed being in school plays at primary school. By that time he was at art college, studying to be a graphic artist. He says his worst fault is indecision, but he unhesitatingly abandoned his chosen career in order to take acting lessons from two retired gay actors. 'I found these two extraordinary old men who taught me what I would have learned if I'd gone to drama school. 'Their first task was to iron out Dance's accent, which was a mongrel cross between Birmingham and Plymouth. 'It was this terrible sound,' he says, uttering a demonstrative nasal burr, 'and Leonard said, "We've got to do something about your voice, boy." They were of the belief that, like a painter who's using a dirty brush to mix a color, it would taint everything. That's just an opinion, and I do know some people who have very pronounced provincial accents and can lose them almost convincingly, but never 100 per cent.' Dance paid for these lessons with his beer money, but I expect that Leonard and Martin probably did it for the sheer joy of gazing at their dishy pupil. Eventually, they managed to wangle him a job as dresser on a local production of Fiddler on the Roof that led to weekly rep, pantomime and, in 1975, the Royal Shakespeare Company.

He was 28 and already five years into his marriage to Jo, a painter and sculptor whom he'd met at a Plymouth students' union meeting. He used to say that his marriage stabilised him but now he says, 'It was ridiculous. I was far too young, I didn't know my arse from a hole in the ground, and I'd never lived on my own before that. Having my own space was something I should have done before getting married. I'd have learned more about myself.'

But the marriage seemed one of the thespian community's most solid, lasting for three decades and producing two children: Rebecca, now 26, an events organiser, and Oliver, 32, an assistant director. 'He's got the qualities to be a good AD, because you either have to have the ability to charm the birds out of the trees or to be a complete bastard. And my darling boy has both of those,' Dance says fondly, admitting that he probably does, too. Jo looked after the children, plus assorted geese, ducks and dogs, at the family's17thcentury Somerset manor. Dance zoomed around the world to pay for all this bucolic bliss, refusing to uproot his family and relocate them to LA. It was a noble attempt to maintain a family life that seems to have ended up an unsatisfactory compromise: Dance found it hard to readjust to home life when he returned, and his decision not to be based in LA may be why he's never actually made it as big as his talents deserve. That and some ill-judged decisions, of course.

After the iconic TV series The Jewel in the Crown, in which he played the dashing Guy Perron he was invited to screen-test for James Bond. 'My agent at the time rang up and said, "Well, it's happened, darling. They've asked you to test for Bond. Don't do it, I beg you!" And I rather stupidly took her advice.' He'd have been a brilliant Bond; he has the requisite air of danger and world-weariness. But instead the role went to soppy Timothy Dalton.

However, Dance doesn't appear to be too downcast about this missed opportunity. 'I'm a bit of a fatalist ' he says. 'I don't know whether I could have handled it, the fame and living up to other people's expectations. It's bad enough trying to live up to your own.' I don't know what his own expectations are for himself, but alongside White Mischief, Hilary and Jackie and Gosford Park, he's appeared in plenty of awful films. One thinks of the Eddie Murphy vehicle The Golden Child, and Last Action Hero with Arnold Schwarzenegger. 'Really, the choice most of us get is to work or not to work. Decisions are made on how much money's in the bank,' he drawls.

The wallet-busting Somerset estate - he call sit a 'money pit' - probably didn't help matters. And perhaps it also added to the strain on the marriage. In any event, the relationship ran into difficulties in 2001, and he and Jo finally divorced in 2004 after 33 years together. The house was sold and Dance moved back to London; he now lives on his own in Kentish Town.

 Since his divorce, he's dated Sophia Myles, 27, whom he met on the set of The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (he played the villainous Ralph Nickleby); he's also been linked with former fashion model turned photographer Shambhala Marthe, but refuses to discuss his current romantic status. Even though he says he and his ex-wife get on well, it seems terribly sad to walk away from a marriage of over three decades, but Dance shrugs away regret: 'I'm quite self-sufficient. I can cook; I can iron a shirt better than any woman I've come across.' Isn't he lonely? 'Sometimes, but not that much,' he says after some thought. 'Somerset didn't get boring, but the kids grew up and weren't there, and it cost me a bloody fortune. It served its purpose.' He now occupies a terraced house with a small garden, rather than the five rolling acres he was used to. 'But it's my space,' he says with emphasis. 'I'm not answerable to anybody and I can double-lock the door and go away. A big house and dogs and cats and geese and ducks and all that stuff we had, they're a bit of a responsibility. Now I can concentrate on the job.' And as we now know, that requires quite some level of concentration. Shadowlands is at Wyndham's Theatre until 15 December (0870 950 0927)

The Evening Standard, London, Oct 19 2007