a fascinating play...crisp, riveting, and touching

July 10, 2005 performance, reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

William Nicholson’s The Retreat From Moscow is fascinating, daunting, complex and at times bewildering. It is dynamically acted by its three well-cast actors and well-staged by director James Warwick.

On the surface it seems simple enough. Edward (Roger Forbes), who has been married to Alice (Jill Tanner) for thirty-three years, suddenly on a weekend when their son Jamie (Tom O’Brien) is visiting them, announces that he is leaving Alice for another woman. Rather naturally this comes as a shock to Alice (and to Jamie), and Alice’s response is anger and denial. She cannot and will not accept it.

But as the play unfolds, the situation keeps taking unexpected turns and a couple of metaphors and a dozen quoted poems weave in and out of the complex plot, seeming several times to reach a conclusion only to have the play continue.

Edward, a high school history teacher, is deep in a book describing the plight of the soldiers returning from the war in Moscow over the tundra; those who cling to the sled make it; those who fall die in the snow. As he reads this aloud to Jamie, we get one of the metaphors. We also soon see that retreating to reading and crossword puzzles is a way he escapes from day-to-day life and nagging conversation with his wife.

However, there seems to be a second metaphor. Edward met Alice thirty four years before when he accidentally took the wrong train at Charing Cross Station. On that train was a fascinating young girl who spouted poetry, swept him off his feet, showed him India. Now he sadly feels that he indeed took the wrong train. Their marriage has been a disaster. They have nothing in common.

Alice is a more complex character and is played brilliantly. For years she has been assembling a poetry anthology and during the play she will quote key lines applicable to her take on the current conflict. The poems come from authors as well known as Frost and Shelley, but Alice also finds words she needs in Rossetti and Herbert and Rilke. And the lines she quotes are applicable to the situation and deal with love, loss, leaving, and living.

This might make Alice sound interesting and lovable, but she has an unforgiving and nagging side that makes one understand why Edward has retreated to silence at home and to another woman at school. And she can be hilariously funny and cruel in her hurt. Her sense of humor is a grim one. After Edward leaves her, she acquires a dog whom she names Edward and whom she has taught to, on command, roll over and die. Wounded Alice has most of the laugh lines, and there are many in this play despite its serious theme, but they are often barbed and bitter-sweet, at best.

Jamie, raised in this fractured household, is gentle, lovable, and a bit lost himself. In the conflict of the moment, he is caught in the middle, loving them both. He has escaped to his own flat in the city but seems to have been unable to forge any lasting relationship of his own. His plight gives us some of the most moving moments in the play, and lines from him near the end seemed to me to be a fit ending for the play, although it still had battles to be fought through and ended later.

The plot of this play is thus so complex, the structure so interwoven with so many brief but dynamic two character confrontations that a sudden blackout, and the too quickly glimpsed bits of poetry too quickly over, made one feel inadequate in regard to its message.

At least twice before the final ending provided by the playwright, there were scenes and moments when it seemed over and one felt the metaphor had been worked out.

In one riveting scene between Jamie and his mother, she threatening suicide and he trying to dissuade her, he refers to the Moscow retreat sled image and begs her to go on, to stay on the sled. He points out he is so much younger and has so much further to go. She must show him it can be done. He is appealing and persuasive. It seemed the play’s ending but was not.

This is a fascinating play, well worth seeing. The acting is crisp, riveting, and touching. Perhaps the point is that in our fractured world there are no happy endings.

A program note lists the quoted plays (but none of the lines). Looking up a few of the poems before you go would be helpful, most but not all are readily accessible. Several I knew, and I quickly found all but two of the others on my own bookshelves and could read them. But this was hindsight. Should you have time to attend the play better prepared than I, you may wish to check out a poem or two. Here is the list:

• The Impulse by Robert Frost
• Two in the Campagna by Robert Browning
• The Collar by George Herbert
• The Confirmation by Edward Muir
• Ozymandias by Shelley
• Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold
• Autumn by Rilke
• Sudden Light by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
• The Flower by George Herbert
• The Fields of Summer Still by Edward Shanks
• Madeleine in Church by Charlotte Mew

As for me, I failed to find a copy of Charlotte Mew and have a feeling this review might have been a more penetrating one had I been able to do so. (Religious belief or unbelief is one of the many sub-themes.) Since the play is a short one, brief audience discussions after each performance would be a real boon. But even without them, the play will provoke much discussion on your ride back from Chester. Go and be fascinated.

The Retreat From Moscow
The Miniature Theatre of Chester - miniaturetheatre.org.
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