Norman Stone: Beyond Shadowlands

Award-winning writer-director Norman Stone has lived with the legacy of C. S. Lewis for a very long time. In 1983, he first conceived a television dramatization based on the work of Lewis biographer Brian Sibley (who, in recent years, has been very visible as a key commentator for Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films). Though the Sibley collaboration faltered, Stone jump-started the project with writer William Nicholson, and the result was the acclaimed 1985 BBC production of Shadowlands, starring Joss Acklund as Lewis and Claire Bloom as Joy Davidman Gresham.

Shadowlands, of course, became insanely popular. Nicholson rewrote Shadowlands as a stageplay, then later teamed with director Richard Attenborough to bring the story to the big screen, with Anthony Hopkins as Lewis and Debra Winger as Gresham.

All three works, directly or indirectly the result of Stone’s initial vision, have been wildly successful in their own way. Douglas Gresham, C. S. Lewis’ stepson, calls Acklund’s performance as Lewis “spot-on,” while preferring Winger’s performance as his mother. He considers the stage play the ideal retelling of the story.

Now, after twenty years have passed, Stone has taken time out from his other work to bring a broader version of Lewis’ biographical story once again to the small screen. Similar versions of the docudrama C. S. Lewis: Beyond Narnia will air this month on Hallmark Channel and on the BBC to coincide with the release of the Disney / Walden Media production of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Why has Stone gone back to the well? Can lightning strike twice?

Obviously, the enormous media circus that the upcoming Narnia movie has become justifies another look at C. S. Lewis, and Stone, along with production company Faith and Values Media, believe that Lewis, through his life, “earned the right to be heard.” So they’ve put together a program that dramatizes the whole arc of Lewis’ spiritual development, while highlighting the origins and impact of The Chronicles of Narnia. And if any TV program about Lewis and Narnia deserves to be watched this holiday season, Beyond Narnia is it.

Part of the reason that Stone’s docudrama succeeds is his recognition that Lewis was perhaps the epitome of a Christian man who saw the need to be “the salt of the earth, not the sugar of the church.” Stone will have no part of historic revisionism that paints Lewis as some whitewashed saint or merely churchy academic. Anyone looking for “sunshine and roses” in this production, says the director, should be sorely disappointed.

But those who believe, as Stone does, that “honesty and truth are at the top of God’s shopping list” will be mightily pleased. In bringing a bigger picture of Lewis to the public than that presented in Shadowlands, Stone felt that “the truth was paramount”—and that, if his depiction of Lewis' one-time atheism or the depth of a widower’s grief offends Lewis idolizers, at least he will “offend fairly.” After all, the bulk of the words that Lewis speaks in the docudrama come straight from Lewis’ own works.

Stone’s depiction of Lewis is palpable. Murray Watts, an associate of Stone’s, has said that the power of TV and film lies in their ability to “make an audience feel so much that they can’t help but think.” Stone hopes that audiences watching his docudrama “cannot help but be moved.” He’s not likely to be disappointed. Audiences will also be left thinking—thinking of the astounding faith of the man behind Narnia.

Maybe, just maybe, they’ll take some time to reflect about the drive of the director, too. We’re fortunate that Norman Stone was the man behind the camera.

(One footnote: Early press about this production promised that it would blow the lid off of long-surpressed facts about the meltdown of the friendship between Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. Mr. Stone told me that the paper which broke the story took egregious liberties, and later published a formal apology and retraction. While Stone accurately portrays the creative and personal tension between the two men, his docudrama takes no liberties in adding to the canon of Inklings lore.)