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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Once upon a time, when my only son was eleven, I leaned over his bed and heard myself say, "Your mother and I are separating." He was silent for a while; then he said, "I don't want your unhappiness." As I left the room, I naively thought, How did he know we were unhappy? This memory, in all its bright grief, came rushing back to me in the middle of "The Retreat from Moscow" (at the Booth), William Nicholson's subtle and powerful evocation of the half-life of a dying marriage.
Resignation--a sort of emotional fog--has settled over the thirty-three-year marriage of an English couple, Edward (John Lithgow), a high-school history teacher, and Alice (Eileen Atkins), an editor; their reserved thirtytwo-year-old son, Jamie (Ben Chaplin), is strategically positioned between them--at once a beacon and a buffer. The curtain comes up on Edward reading aloud from a text about Napoleon's disastrous Russian campaign; this historical event, it soon becomes clear, is a metaphor for Edward's own emotional exhaustion, his longing for escape, and the deep regret he feels over the tactical blunders he has made in life. As Lithgow superbly plays him--a big, passive man with a small, dithering voice--Edward refuses to engage; he hides behind his books, his silences, and his vagueness. He is a present absence, a sort of ghost of himself. "It's like somehow you've sneaked away while I...
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