The Retreat from Moscow: A Play About a Family by William Nicholson (English) Pa

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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? In" The Retreat from Moscow," William Nicholson, 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.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.

FORMATPaperback LANGUAGEEnglish CONDITIONBrand New Publisher Description

EARLY ON SALE to coincide with the Broadway production.The celebrated author ofShadowlands 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 YorkHow 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.

Author Biography

WILLIAM NICHOLSON is the author of the play Shadowlands, which was made into a film starring Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger. He received an Academy Award nomination for his screenplay for Shadowlands and has written numerous other screenplays as well as a forthcoming novel, The Society of Others, and a trilogy of children's fantasy adventure novels. He lives in London.

Review

"A finely perceptive, eloquently tender and exquisite new play." —New York"Riveting.... Subtle and powerful, [with] marvelous emotional complexity." —The New Yorker"A tense family drama.... Spare, emotionally brutal." —Time Out New York"A truly devastating piece of theater." —New York Daily News"The best new play in twenty years.... This perfectly written masterwork shimmers with delicacy and precision." —The Journal News

Review Quote

"A finely perceptive, eloquently tender and exquisite new play." -John Simon,New York "Riveting. . . . Subtle and powerful, [with] marvelous emotional complexity." -John Lahr,The New Yorker "A tense family drama. . . . Spare, emotionally brutal." -Time Out New York "A truly devastating piece of theater." -New York Daily News "The best new play in twenty years. . . . This perfectly written masterwork shimmers with delicacy and precision." -The Journal News

Excerpt from Book

ACT ONE The stage in darkness. Two armchairs. A table with three upright chairs. A sink, cooker, fridge, and cupboard. Three people sit motionless in the darkness. edward, a schoolteacher in his late fifties, in one armchair. His wife, alice, about the same age, in the other. Their son, jamie, in his early thirties, at the table. All three actors remain onstage throughout. When one character is no longer present in a scene, he becomes still, and the lights go down on him. The audience can still see him, but the other characters cannot. The shadowed actor sits or stands, suspended in time, and does not react to what takes place around him, until the lights return him to the action. Lights come up on EDWARD. He reads from a book. EDWARD: "As men dropped in the intense cold, their bodies were stripped of clothing by their own comrades, and left naked in the snow, still alive." ( Lights come up on JAMIE, sipping at a mug of coffee, listening .) "Others, having lost or burned their shoes, were marching with bare feet and legs. The frozen skin and muscles were exfoliating themselves, like successive layers of wax statues. The bones were exposed, but being frozen, were completely insensitive to pain. Some officers, suffering from diarrhoea, found themselves unable to do their trousers up. I myself helped one of these unfortunates to put his asterisk-asterisk-asterisk back, and button himself up. He was crying like a child." JAMIE: I wonder what word he used. EDWARD: Who knows? Something French. JAMIE: Yes. I suppose it would be. EDWARD: A surprisingly large number of the officers kept diaries. Over a hundred and fifty have survived. Remarkable, really, given the conditions on the retreat. JAMIE: How many died? EDWARD: Napoleon marched four hundred fifty thousand men across the Niemen. Less than twenty thousand came back. How was the drive down? jamie: Not bad. I left just after five. ( Both check their watches, making the same movement. ) EDWARD: An hour and three-quarters. I wouldn''t have thought there was that much traffic on a Saturday evening. JAMIE: It took twenty minutes just getting through Tunbridge Wells. EDWARD: Tunbridge Wells is slow. JAMIE: I think I might have a bath. EDWARD: Yes. Do. JAMIE: Wash off the London grime. ( He rises, and takes his coffee mug to the sink. ) So everything''s alright, then? EDWARD: Much as ever. And you? JAMIE: Busy. EDWARD: Let''s see if we can find a moment. Before you go back. JAMIE: Sure. (EDWARD returns to his book. Lights go down on him. ) ( Lights come up on ALICE. JAMIE walks across to stand behind her chair. ) ALICE: It seems to me as I grow older that people become ruder. They say nobody''s taught manners any more, but I don''t think it''s that. I think middle-aged women have become invisible. You have to be young, or rich, or beautiful, to be noticed at all. I don''t quite know how to cope with it, except by getting angry, which I do more or less all the time these days. I''ve been having trouble with my printer. Did I tell you? JAMIE: No. What''s the problem? ALICE: I dropped it. JAMIE: Ah. They don''t like that. ALICE: "Sudden and swift and light as that The ties gave And he learned of finalities Besides the grave." JAMIE: Auden? ALICE: Robert Frost. A strange little poem called "The Impulse." I''m putting it in my anthology under Lost Love. JAMIE: How''s the anthology coming along? ALICE: Well, it isn''t, really, until I can get the printer fixed. Did you come down alone? JAMIE: Yes. Have you got someone to look at it? ALICE: Darling, there isn''t anyone. People don''t fix things any more, they throw them away. I rang every shop in the Yellow Pages, but all they wanted to do was sell me a new one. I found a man at last who said, rather grudgingly, "Bring it in," so I drove all the way to this hellish industrial estate, where there was this hellish computer warehouse, and I lugged the damned machine in through one of those ferocious doors that try to crush you, and there was one little man, all alone in this vast space, sitting at a keyboard, going tick-tick-tick. No attempt to help me as I struggled in. Not a word. Not a look. After a while I said, "I''m a customer. Aren''t you supposed to serve me?" He looked up and said, "Well?" Just, "Well?" I said, "My printer''s not working." I showed him the page I''d brought in to explain the problem. I''d been trying to print out a Browning poem, the one that ends "Just when I seem about to learn Where is the thread, now off again, The old trick only I discern Infinite passion, and the pain Of finite hearts that yearn." That''s going into Lost Love, too. It''s turning out to be by far the largest section in the anthology. Anyway, the printer had left off the first two words or so of every line, which made the poem rather modern, but not as good. The man in the warehouse said, "That''s not a printer problem. The printer''s fine. It''s what you''re doing that''s wrong. You''re the problem." He actually said it, in those very words. "You''re the problem." "How do you know?" I said. "You haven''t looked at the printer. You haven''t even switched it on." "I know," he said, "because if a printer prints wrong, it''s not the printer''s fault." "Are you the printer''s mother?" I asked him. "Are you telling me that printers never go wrong?" "I''m telling you," he said, "that if the printer''s printing, then the printer''s fine." "But it''s not fine," I said. "It''s not printing right. Well, actually, it is printing right, but it''s not printing left." He didn''t have an answer to that. He went back to going tick-tick-tick. "Excuse me," I said. "I''m not finished. I want you to look at my printer." He paid me no attention whatsoever. So I picked up my printer, to take it over to where he sat, and I dropped it. It made a kind of tinkling noise. He looked up when he heard that, and smiled a cruel little smile, and said, "Would you like me to sell you a new printer?" I was so angry I wanted to hit him. So I said to him, "You''re the kind of man who doesn''t love anybody and nobody loves you. You''ve got no friends, and your wife hates you, and your children never talk to you." He looked quite surprised for a moment or two. Then he said, "Do you know me from somewhere?" JAMIE: Oh, Ma. ALICE: What do you think I should do? JAMIE: Buy another printer. ALICE: I feel such a fool. JAMIE: Is it alright if I have a bath? ALICE: Yes, of course, darling. When are you going back? JAMIE: After lunch tomorrow. ALICE: Thank you for coming. I know how busy you are. JAMIE: Don''t be silly. ( Lights fade on JAMIE, and come up on EDWARD. He looks up from his book. ) EDWARD: They found Moscow empty, so they plundered it, which meant they were followed on the retreat by an enormous baggage train. This in turn was followed by raiding parties of Cossacks. When men were wounded, or frostbitten, and could no longer walk, orders were given to carry them on the baggage wagons. This slowed the wagons down, of course, and reduced the chances that the baggage train would make it to Smolensk. So the wagon-drivers looked out for especially rutted ground, and then drove fast over it, so that the wounded would be jolted off the wagons, without anyone noticing. Once left behind on the road, they froze to death. This was understood to be an accident. It was an unspoken conspiracy, by the strong, against the weak. Nobody looked back. ALICE: It''s horrible, Edward. Why do you go on reading it? EDWARD: It is horrible. But it''s curiously compelling, too. I suppose because it exposes the way human beings behave in extremis. When it''s a matter of survival, people show no mercy. ALICE: What utter rot. History is full of people laying down their lives for others. What about Jesus Christ? EDWARD: Oh, well. Jesus Christ. ALICE: Don''t just sit there and say, "Oh well, Jesus Christ." EDWARD: Yes, but he was God. I mean, he knew he''d rise again. ALICE: What difference does that make? EDWARD: Well, he would have known it wasn''t the end. ALICE: So you think that made it easy for him? EDWARD: No, not quite that ALICE: You try being crucified. See how you like it. EDWARD: Well, of course, I wouldn''t. ALICE: Then stop talking such rot. Honestly, Edward, I hope you don''t talk rot like that in your Religious Studies classes. Has Jamie said anything to you? EDWARD: About what? ALICE: About anything. EDWARD: He told me how long it had taken him to drive down. ALICE: He can''t have. EDWARD: Why not? ALICE: Because it''s such a stupid and pointless thing to talk about. Why would he say anything so ridiculously dull? EDWARD: I asked him. ALICE: You asked him? EDWARD: Yes. ALICE: You asked him how long it had taken him to drive down here? EDWARD: Something like that. ALICE: Why? Do you care? EDWARD: P

Details ISBN140007763X Author William Nicholson Short Title RETREAT FROM MOSCOW Language English ISBN-10 140007763X ISBN-13 9781400077632 Media Book Format Paperback DEWEY 822.914 Year 2004 Residence ENK DOI 10.1604/9781400077632 Country of Publication India UK Release Date 2004-03-23 Pages 128 Publisher Random House USA Inc Publication Date 2004-03-23 Imprint Random House USA Inc Subtitle A Play About a Family Audience General We've got this

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