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The Retreat from Moscow
The celebrated author of Shadowlands tells the powerful story of a husband who decides to be truthful in his marriage, and of the wife and son whose lives will never be the same again.
“A finely perceptive, eloquently tender and exquisite new play.” — New York
How well do we know the people we marry? Is it wrong to decide it’s time to be honest? Is love enough to save a family?
Edward and Alice have been married for thirty-three years. He is a teacher at a boys school, perfectly at home with his daily crossword and lately engrossed in reading about Napoleon’s costly invasion of Moscow. She is an observant Catholic, exacting and opinionated, and has been collecting poems about lost love for a new anthology. Jamie, their diffident thirty-two year old son, is visiting for the weekend when Edward announces he has met another woman. With the coiled intensity of Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing and the embracing empathy of Edward Albee’s best family dramas, The Retreat from Moscow shines a breathtakingly natural light on the fallout of a shattered marriage.
“A finely perceptive, eloquently tender and exquisite new play.” — New York
How well do we know the people we marry? Is it wrong to decide it’s time to be honest? Is love enough to save a family?
Edward and Alice have been married for thirty-three years. He is a teacher at a boys school, perfectly at home with his daily crossword and lately engrossed in reading about Napoleon’s costly invasion of Moscow. She is an observant Catholic, exacting and opinionated, and has been collecting poems about lost love for a new anthology. Jamie, their diffident thirty-two year old son, is visiting for the weekend when Edward announces he has met another woman. With the coiled intensity of Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing and the embracing empathy of Edward Albee’s best family dramas, The Retreat from Moscow shines a breathtakingly natural light on the fallout of a shattered marriage.
124 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2004
About the author
William Nicholson
221 books482 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
William Nicholson was born in 1948, and grew up in Sussex and Gloucestershire. His plays for television include Shadowlands and Life Story , both of which won the BAFTA Best Television Drama award in their year; other award-winners were Sweet As You Are and The March . In 1988 he received the Royal Television Society's Writer's Award. His first play, an adaptation of Shadowlands for the stage, was Evening Standard Best Play of 1990, and went on to a Tony Award winning run on Broadway. He was nominated for an Oscar for the screenplay of the film version, which was directed by Richard Attenborough and starred Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger.
Since then he has written more films - Sarafina, Nell, First Knight, Grey Owl , and Gladiator (as co-writer), for which he received a second Oscar nomination. He has written and directed his own film, Firelight ; and three further stage plays, Map of the Heart , Katherine Howard and The Retreat from Moscow , which ran for five months on Broadway and received three Tony Award nominations.
His novel for older children, The Wind Singer, won the Smarties Prize Gold Award on publication in 2000, and the Blue Peter Book of the Year Award in 2001. Its sequel, Slaves of the Mastery , was published in May 2001, and the final volume in the trilogy, Firesong , in May 2002. The trilogy has been sold in every major foreign market, from the US to China.
He is now at work on a new sequence of novels for older children, called The Noble Warriors . The first book, Seeker , was published in the UK in September 2005.The second book, Jango, in 2006 and the third book NOMAN, will be published in September 2007.
His novels for adults are The Society of Others (April 2004) and The Trial of True Love (April 2005).
He lives in Sussex with his wife Virginia and their three children.
from williamnicholson.co.uk
William Nicholson was born in 1948, and grew up in Sussex and Gloucestershire. His plays for television include Shadowlands and Life Story , both of which won the BAFTA Best Television Drama award in their year; other award-winners were Sweet As You Are and The March . In 1988 he received the Royal Television Society's Writer's Award. His first play, an adaptation of Shadowlands for the stage, was Evening Standard Best Play of 1990, and went on to a Tony Award winning run on Broadway. He was nominated for an Oscar for the screenplay of the film version, which was directed by Richard Attenborough and starred Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger.
Since then he has written more films - Sarafina, Nell, First Knight, Grey Owl , and Gladiator (as co-writer), for which he received a second Oscar nomination. He has written and directed his own film, Firelight ; and three further stage plays, Map of the Heart , Katherine Howard and The Retreat from Moscow , which ran for five months on Broadway and received three Tony Award nominations.
His novel for older children, The Wind Singer, won the Smarties Prize Gold Award on publication in 2000, and the Blue Peter Book of the Year Award in 2001. Its sequel, Slaves of the Mastery , was published in May 2001, and the final volume in the trilogy, Firesong , in May 2002. The trilogy has been sold in every major foreign market, from the US to China.
He is now at work on a new sequence of novels for older children, called The Noble Warriors . The first book, Seeker , was published in the UK in September 2005.The second book, Jango, in 2006 and the third book NOMAN, will be published in September 2007.
His novels for adults are The Society of Others (April 2004) and The Trial of True Love (April 2005).
He lives in Sussex with his wife Virginia and their three children.
from williamnicholson.co.uk
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
June 13, 2022
I just learned that a movie, Hope Gap, based on this play and starring Bill Nighy and Annette Bening has just been released in the UK. Thought I would read the source material first.
July 5, 2018
Beautifully observed and tense family drama about the fallout that occurs when divorce occurs. Nicholson, in two crisp acts of drama, manages to present all sides of the troubled, all-too-ordinary marriage.
June 5, 2015
Despite the rather unfortunate metaphorical title, Nicholson is a master dramatist and although not quite as good a play as his 'Shadowlands', still a most worthy vehicle - wish I had seen the brilliantly cast original Broadway production (Eileen Atkins, Ben Chaplin and John Lithgow - although Bill Nighy might have been a better choice as Edward). What keeps this from being a 5 star play is the prickly character of Alice, who is a bullying termagant; one can easily sympathisize with Edward for wanting to get away from her after 33 dreary years of marriage. And Alice's joy at becoming a telephone AIDS counselor, because she has found people even more wretched than herself, is insensitively condescending. The ending is also rather too pat and weak.
April 11, 2023
Je komt het amper nog tegen: een sterke nieuwe theatertekst. Ik ontdekte het via de mooie film 'Hope Gap' met Bill Nighy en Annette Bening.
Misschien is de ontknoping minder sterk dan had gekund, maar onderweg geniet je van dialogen van een oerdegelijke Britse kwaliteit: intelligent, subtiel, met tal van understatements indirect emotie suggererend. Het contrast tussen beide echtelieden, de non-communicatie is schrijnend scherp. Wat een scheiding op latere leeftijd emotioneel betekent wordt haarfijn opgeroepen. De zoon als gefrustreerde onmogelijke bemiddelaar tussen de 2 vuren in is een gouden greep, maakt de catastrofe nog overweldigender.
Opvoeren maar!
Misschien is de ontknoping minder sterk dan had gekund, maar onderweg geniet je van dialogen van een oerdegelijke Britse kwaliteit: intelligent, subtiel, met tal van understatements indirect emotie suggererend. Het contrast tussen beide echtelieden, de non-communicatie is schrijnend scherp. Wat een scheiding op latere leeftijd emotioneel betekent wordt haarfijn opgeroepen. De zoon als gefrustreerde onmogelijke bemiddelaar tussen de 2 vuren in is een gouden greep, maakt de catastrofe nog overweldigender.
Opvoeren maar!
March 8, 2014
Clever and thought provoking
February 24, 2020
Before Marriage Story....there's this! I was unclear on the ending and almost wished it was longer!
November 7, 2022
The Retreat from Moscow is about a young man whose parents' marriage collapses. Jamie is 32 and has for some time been physically and emotionally distant from his family, visiting only rarely and sharing little about his feelings or his personal/social life. But on this particular weekend trip back home, things change drastically: Jamie's dad Edward reveals to his son, after a bruising and embarrassingly exposed row with Jamie's mom Alice, that he is in love with another woman and plans to leave--that very day.
By the time playwright William Nicholson drops this bombshell on the audience, he's already stacked the deck rather heavily against Alice. What we know of her from her early Act One appearances is mostly unpleasant: she's stubborn (insisting that Jamie attend mass despite his protestations), argumentative (she recounts a mildly amusing anecdote about how she picked a fight with a computer store clerk), and relentlessly controlling (her sarcastic ribbing of husband Edward's wish to do the daily crossword puzzle eventually shames him into putting it down).
So Edward's announcement doesn't feel especially shocking: if anything, we're primed to believe that Alice's shrewish nature has driven her husband away. Nevertheless, it is Alice who quickly assumes the role of victim as soon as Edward walks out; though she seems entirely grounded (religiously as well as secularly), she appears utterly discombobulated by the sudden death of her marriage, threatening to kill herself and musing unhumorously about Edward's demise as well. Alice makes herself into a burden on Jamie, enlisting him to serve as go-between with Edward and manipulating him into spending more time with her and coping with her mercurial mood swings and tantrums. Edward, meanwhile, both folds further into himself--becoming more of a nebbish than he even already was--and blossoms under the nurturing if passive influence of his new lover.
The point of all of the foregoing being, I think, that along with their marriage, both Alice and Edward pretty much implode in the eyes of their loving if indifferent son: the real journey in The Retreat from Moscow is his, as he discovers that his parents are terribly flawed, terribly selfish, and terribly concerned with their own welfare ahead of his. He concludes that he has to learn from their examples, warts and all: what he goes through is as untethering and ultimately as profound as if one or both of them had died.
It's an interesting point of view for a play, and it mostly succeeds, in spite of the fact that Jamie is a very passive protagonist, while his more vividly rendered mother and father are essentially supporting (and imperfectly and impressionistically drawn) characters. There are other problems. Alice is editing a poetry anthology (it's not entirely made clear exactly why she's doing so), and, reflective of this conceit, Nicholson quotes liberally from Shelley, Rilke, Frost, Rossetti, and many others. Maybe too liberally: by the middle of Act Two, it starts to feel as though Nicholson is compiling his own poetry anthology instead of writing an original play. He's also, troublingly, saddled himself with a title that just doesn't seem to want to function as a central metaphor. The Retreat from Moscow refers to Napoleon's, after his disastrous Russian campaign; both Alice and Edward say in places that their marriage (and its subsequent breakup) is like that retreat, but their reasoning invariably comes across as forced.
By the time playwright William Nicholson drops this bombshell on the audience, he's already stacked the deck rather heavily against Alice. What we know of her from her early Act One appearances is mostly unpleasant: she's stubborn (insisting that Jamie attend mass despite his protestations), argumentative (she recounts a mildly amusing anecdote about how she picked a fight with a computer store clerk), and relentlessly controlling (her sarcastic ribbing of husband Edward's wish to do the daily crossword puzzle eventually shames him into putting it down).
So Edward's announcement doesn't feel especially shocking: if anything, we're primed to believe that Alice's shrewish nature has driven her husband away. Nevertheless, it is Alice who quickly assumes the role of victim as soon as Edward walks out; though she seems entirely grounded (religiously as well as secularly), she appears utterly discombobulated by the sudden death of her marriage, threatening to kill herself and musing unhumorously about Edward's demise as well. Alice makes herself into a burden on Jamie, enlisting him to serve as go-between with Edward and manipulating him into spending more time with her and coping with her mercurial mood swings and tantrums. Edward, meanwhile, both folds further into himself--becoming more of a nebbish than he even already was--and blossoms under the nurturing if passive influence of his new lover.
The point of all of the foregoing being, I think, that along with their marriage, both Alice and Edward pretty much implode in the eyes of their loving if indifferent son: the real journey in The Retreat from Moscow is his, as he discovers that his parents are terribly flawed, terribly selfish, and terribly concerned with their own welfare ahead of his. He concludes that he has to learn from their examples, warts and all: what he goes through is as untethering and ultimately as profound as if one or both of them had died.
It's an interesting point of view for a play, and it mostly succeeds, in spite of the fact that Jamie is a very passive protagonist, while his more vividly rendered mother and father are essentially supporting (and imperfectly and impressionistically drawn) characters. There are other problems. Alice is editing a poetry anthology (it's not entirely made clear exactly why she's doing so), and, reflective of this conceit, Nicholson quotes liberally from Shelley, Rilke, Frost, Rossetti, and many others. Maybe too liberally: by the middle of Act Two, it starts to feel as though Nicholson is compiling his own poetry anthology instead of writing an original play. He's also, troublingly, saddled himself with a title that just doesn't seem to want to function as a central metaphor. The Retreat from Moscow refers to Napoleon's, after his disastrous Russian campaign; both Alice and Edward say in places that their marriage (and its subsequent breakup) is like that retreat, but their reasoning invariably comes across as forced.
January 20, 2024
The first act of Williams Nicholson's quietly devastating memory play is much better than it's plodding and tedious second act. The play centers around the disintegration of a long and dysfunctional marriage and the only child thrust into the role of conflict mediator. Mom is am ultra-religious house wife with a passion for poetry, dad is a college professor of history, leaving his wife for a younger woman, and the son is sweet and possibly closeted. Again, the familiar character archetypes and tropes mostly work in a first act that is rife with well-written Chekhovian tension, banter, and wry humor. The first act focuses on the days leading up to the separation but the "aftermath" of the second half is an over-written mess. The drama would have worked better as a one-act since it seems the playwright didn't know how to end the story. The use of poetry as a subtextual device got tired real quick.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews