Hey, Narnia Fans! Welcome to “Behind the Wardrobe” an Interview Series with Douglas Gresham. Join me as we find out about CS Lewis, Narnia and more in this interview series.
Special thanks to Paul Martin (The Webmaster for NarniaFans) and to Mr. Douglas Gresham himself for this amazing opportunity. And an even bigger thanks to Mr. Gresham for putting up with a few of my impossible questions. Thanks for being such a great sport about it!
For this week: On The Shadowlands…
JS: What was your opinion of the play The Shadowlands?
DG: I think it a wonderful play, but then I am biased. I have been a consultant to Shadowlands in all its varying inceptions ever since Brian Sibley and Norman Stone first wrote the concept script about 20 odd years ago. Incidentally the play is being revived and will shortly open again in London’s West End. I don’t know though whether there are any plans to move the production to America though.
JS: How did you feel about how they portrayed Jack?
DG: I have seen so many productions in which the portrayals always depended on the actor playing the role that it is hard to remember a specific portrayal. The play itself portrays not C.S.Lewis, nor Jack, but a fictional character based on him. Remember that Shadowlands is not supposed to be an Historical documentary, but is a very beautiful love story based on real events in the lives of some real people.
JS:Thank you for the clarification that The Shadowlands is not a historical documentary. In a class I took in college it was, more or less, portrayed as a historical documentary to us.
DG: It was never intended to be so, and I would have though that it is pretty obvious. After all there are only four characters based on real people in the whole movie, all the rest are entirely fictional.
JS: Have most people mistaken the play for a historical documentary?
DG: I don’t think so, I haven’t come across too many folk who have.
JS: Notably one of the major differences was the absence of your brother David. How did you feel about this change?
DG: This change was made for very straightforward theatrical and dramatic reasons and so when I fully understood the reasons I had no problem with it.
JS: Would you be able to elaborate a bit on what the theatrical and dramatic reasons for the exclusion of your brother from the play were?
DG: It is very simple really, first, if you have two children each reacting differently to the same situations, you automatically have two subplots. In the first TV version of Shadowlands this was done, and on studying it later, it was discovered that having the two subplots actually detracted from the main theme of the piece rather than complementing it, so it was decided to drop one child for the Stage play version. Also contributing to that decision was the fact that for stage work each child character has to be played by two child actors as there are legal restrictions on how many performances a child actor may make without a break. This was seen to work very well and thus for Dick Attenborough’s version the one child policy was adhered to.
JS: How about some of the other changes they made to the story? For example Lewis driving, your character asking for Jack to sign a copy of Magician’s Nephew, of Jack as a Roman Catholic.
DG: As far as I know Jack was never portrayed as a Roman Catholic, but as for the rest I didn’t care hoot.
JS: How did you feel about Anthony Hopkins’s and Debra Winger’s portrayals of Jack and Joy in the film version?
DG: Tony was faithfully presenting the role he found in the screenplay, and not trying to be C.S.Lewis or Jack, and I think that is a pity because I think Tony could have portrayed the real Jack very well indeed. Debra on the other hand was superb as my mother. However if one is going to talk about the film, one has to say that Dick Attenborough is one of the finest directors ever to walk the planet (and one of the finest English Gentlemen as well) , and his fine touch and gentle hand made what I consider to be a classic movie with which I am very proud to have been associated.
JS: How well did Joseph Mazzello do at portraying you in the film?
DG: Very well indeed, but as I told him on set one day, for him it was easy, after all he had a script to follow, I had to ad-lib the whole thing.
JS: The funny thing for me with the film of “The Shadowlands” is that I forever associated both director Richard Attenborough and Joseph Mazzello with their roles as John Hammond and Tim Murphy in Steven Speilberg’s Jurassic Park.
DG: Knowing them both personally made a big difference I suppose.
JS: Though it could be worse. I even had a friend who had a hard time watching the film as she associated Anthony Hopkins with Hannibal Lecter!
DG: I think that a lot of people had that reaction to him in Remains of the Day rather than in Shadowlands, but I know what you mean.
JS: Have you ever considered playing Jack in a production of The Shadowlands?
DG: I really don’t think I could do it justice (the role I mean), I am too emotionally involved in the whole thing.
That’s it for this weeks installment. Come back next week when we discuss Douglas’s book Jack’s Life , CS Lewis’s unfinished novels “The Dark Tower” and “After Ten Years”, the film of The Screwtape Letters and some other matters.
