|
 |
After the Love Is Gone
By Jerry Tallmer
02 Oct 2003
Eileen Atkins stars as a woman confronted with the dissolution of her marriage in William Nicholson’s The Retreat from Moscow
In The Retreat from Moscow, the tough and beautiful play by William Nicholson that brings Eileen Atkins
back to Broadway, a woman named Alice (Ms. Atkins) has been working on the Lost Love section of her
personal anthology of great English poetry, some of it well known, some not, when her husband Edward
(John Lithgow), a professor of Religious Studies, breaks the news that he's walking out on their 33
years of marriage. He has met another woman who is nicer to him. Sandbagged emotionally between his
parents, and not liking it one bit, is their 32-year-old son Jamie (Ben Chaplin), who tries with dubious
success to adhere to his stated position of "just keeping well out of the line of fire."
The central poem in the whole work is Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" (which foreshadowed World
War I by 47 years, WW II by 72 years and 9/11/01 by 134 years). "Just that last line," said Eileen
Atkins on a sunny Saturday morning in New York as rehearsals were about to get under way toward an
October opening at the Booth. "'Ah, love, let us be true to one another . . .' I'll tell you something
extraordinary," Ms. Atkins said. "I was asked some time ago to pick a poem for a book for refugees,
and I picked 'Dover Beach.' It's been one of my favorites since childhood. Though, if there's one thing I
hate, it's people who recite."
She was asked if she herself could relate to a woman being ditched.
"Oh, sure," said the twice-married actress ("Gosford Park," "The Hours")/playwright(Vita and Virginia)/screenwriter ("Mrs. Dalloway")/co-creator (with Jean Marsh, of "Upstairs,
Downstairs"), who at this writing has been wed to producer Bill Shepherd for 26 years. "But I can
relate to a murderer as well," she said cheerily. "I can relate to anyone. I'm a naturally vile person.
Horrible."
Second thought: "I hope I'm human."
Third thought: "I mean, I'm as old as" — she searched for the name of the woman she'd be playing —
"as old as Alice, but I still have a husband. When my girlfriends of the past used to say, 'Oh, I've been
left but I don't mind,' then I'd think: You can't have felt passion. That's a silly thing to boast about. And
I've been left. And I've left. Shakespeare said it: 'Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved
at all.'"
No, she's had no children.
"Want a complicated story? My first husband couldn't have children. We had an amicable divorce.
Then he married again, and miraculously he had one child, and I'm the godmother, and that child is called
James and now is the same age, 32, as the son, Jamie, in this play."
Fourth thought from Cockney-born Dame Eileen Atkins, who has worked at what she does since being
thrust by her mother into dancing class at age 3, then hoofing it, and hating it, at workmen's clubs until
age 12:
"Where I live now, right on the river [Thames], it's full of ladies dying off who were kept by their
husbands and never worked. I get a lot of knocking on the door: 'Coffee, Eileen?' I always give them a
lecture — this is the vile part of me — 'Pull yourself together and do something.' My friends say that's
my favorite phrase. So I'd be slightly contemptuous of my character in this play if she didn't pull
herself together and do something. If your life totally revolves around your husband, that's terrible."
With a burst of laughter: "When Bill Shepherd asked me to marry him, I said, 'I don't do shirts, I
don't do breakfast, and I go to America whenever I want.'" Two beats. "I once had an affair with
Edward Fox. He said, 'I'll only marry you if you give up going to America.' I said, 'I'm off to America
next month.'"
So now she's once again in America — in a drama that, through a series of misunderstandings,
playwright Nicholson, who is married to Virginia Woolf's great niece, was at first led to believe Ms.
Atkins didn't like. Quite the opposite — though it is, she affirms, very close to the bone (his bone). She
wouldn't mind if, at the Booth, it ran straight through without intermission (probably won't). "I mean,
look at Long Day's Journey. At least with this play, if it went straight through, we'd all be in a
restaurant by 10:00." Which is more than any of Napoleon's men could look forward to during the
retreat from Moscow — as Alice, out there in the snow, could more than tell you.
Contact Us | Advertise | Privacy Policy
Send questions and comments to the Webmaster
Copyright © 2008 Playbill, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
|
|
|
|
|