>>REVIEW
THE RETREAT FROM MOSCOW
Runs until February 11
Max Bell Theatre (Epcor Centre)
The Retreat from Moscow portrays the disintegration of a marriage. It is relentlessly intimate, inviting the audience into the lives of its characters and then, for two searing acts, barring the door. In fact, watching this play is much like spending the evening with one’s family. The material is familiar – almost queasily so. We’ve seen this dance before. Yet, again as in families, we remain fascinated, perhaps in spite of ourselves.
After 33 years of marriage, Alice and Edward are in deep trouble. She is a nearly grotesque exemplar of that perennial anti-favourite, the Woman Who Loves (Way, Way) Too Much. She rages against the dying of their passion with an almost inhuman energy, alternately pleading, hectoring and cajoling. Edward, it seems, just wants to be left alone to do his crossword. Ah, but all is not as starchy as it seems inside Edward’s carefully pressed shirt. He’s in love, you see. With someone less intense than Alice. Someone who’ll accept him for what he is, not some idea of what he should or could be. Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
What is unusual here is the degree to which Alice is permitted to show her bewilderment, pain and, yes, rage. In these politically careful times, her raw and repeated displays of emotion seem almost indecent. True, she does go through the motions of recovery, trading her frumpy skirt for clownish silk pants and acquiring a dog that, with characteristic dark humour, she names Eddy and teaches to play dead. Still, it’s painfully clear that she has no real interest in moving on.
Two things keep our sympathies firmly with Alice, even at her most self-pitying. The first is the script’s intelligent understanding of what it means for a woman, even today, to be left alone. People avoid her. She is poorer, in more than one sense. At least widows, she complains, inspire respect.
The second is Martha Henry’s no-holds-barred performance. Henry is a great actress, of course (for good reason she is often called the First Lady of the Canadian Stage). Alice is a perfect part for her to sink her teeth into, and sink them she does. If she leaves a few bite marks on the pleasingly minimalist scenery in the process, we don’t mind. Alice is supposed to be larger than life. She’s spent years compiling an anthology of love poetry that she recites at many available opportunities. In the hands of a lesser actress, the part might seem unbearably contrived. But Henry exposes the humanity and fear underneath the blowsy histrionics and so makes the play.
David Shurmann as the stoic Edward and Duncan Ollerenshaw as Jamie, the couple’s visiting adult son, do a fine job of adding texture to Alice’s long shadow. Shurmann conveys real humanity with a minimum of fuss. Ollerenshaw’s imposing yet ambivalently loping physicality nicely captures Jamie’s discomfort with his rock-and-a-hard-place position. He is determined to remain neutral, yet torn apart by his mother’s grief. Ollerenshaw’s upper-register voice doesn’t always fare well at the volume at which it’s exercised here – all three actors seem to have been instructed to project to the back of the Epcor Centre, not just the room – and he is given some tough sells, including an intensely poetic soliloquy that bears the weight of the entire play. But it’s a finely written role, and Ollerenshaw manages to be moving and not maudlin 96 minutes out of a hundred.
Other elements of the script fare less well. The metaphor that gives the play its title – Napoleon’s disastrous retreat from Moscow in 1812 – is forced and quickly becomes tedious. Alice’s Catholicism, invoked repeatedly as a deep reason for her resistance to divorce, isn’t explored in any meaningful way. Once the battle lines are drawn, the play goes nowhere we don’t expect – the entire second act is really just theatrical scab-picking.
It must be said, too, that Alice’s poetry anthology really should, were it ever to be published, be emblazoned with a large capital "D" for device. (It was modelled on an anthology Nicholson’s own mother made for him when he was dumped as a young man – a good example of how what inspires in life often comes out, ironically, as false in art.) Still, device as they may be, the poems give us by far the most beautiful words in the play, and it’s an exquisite pleasure to hear them delivered in Henry’s deep, affecting voice. In fact, I’ll end with one of them, by Edward Shanks, which so well encapsulates just what Alice must feel she has lost:
So some old couple, who in youth
With love were filled and over-full,
And loved with strength and loved with truth,
In heavy age are beautiful. |
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