From a well of grief, his play shines light

William Nicholson doesn’t remember exactly what drew him back five years ago to his personal book of grief, the diary he kept as a young man.

When he opened it, tears came. And with them the impetus, and some of the verbatim lines, for the only autobiographical piece this prolific English playwright-screenwriter-novelist has done. “The Retreat From Moscow,” having its West Coast premiere at South Coast Repertory, is a drama about Nicholson’s days as a human shuttlecock, volleyed back and forth by loving, well-meaning but deeply unhappy parents who inflicted their damage on him as their long marriage disintegrated.

Nicholson made his name in the early 1990s with the stage and screen hit “Shadowlands,” an intellectual tear-jerker about confirmed bachelor C.S. Lewis’ late-blooming love for Joy Gresham, only to lose her to cancer. As one of three screenwriters for “Gladiator,” he gave spiritual longings to the Roman warrior played by Russell Crowe. And “Wind on Fire,” a trilogy of philosophical fantasy books for children published a few years ago, has established Nicholson in his mid-50s as the successful novelist he yearned to be when he was a young man filling diary pages with the hurt of rejections both literary (his first eight novels went unpublished) and romantic.

He said, she said

Writers, especially those in their 50s, don’t usually ask permission to tell a story. But Nicholson knew he would need parental consent for “The Retreat From Moscow.”

He says that for his mother, Hope, now 88, the hurt of being left by his father, Basil, for another woman “never went away.” It was a shattering experience for a devout Roman Catholic who believed marriage was for life and to discard it was to commit a kind of murder. Years later, she still would bring it up, and Nicholson thinks he may have gone back to his diary entries from his late 20s, the time of the breakup, to check the accuracy of something she recalled.

“I took it out, and it just made me weep,” he said recently by phone from his home in the hills of Sussex. “And I thought, ‘Is there any way I can bring any good out of this? How can I throw a light on this that doesn’t make it all a pitiful waste?’ ”

The play’s title, and one of its organizing metaphors, was in his diary: an observation that his mother “in one of her worst moments” had likened her trauma as a spurned wife to the almost complete destruction of Napoleon’s army on its trek back from the failed invasion of Russia during the brutal winter of 1812.

From the start, Nicholson resolved to give his parents veto power over whether his script could be staged. He sensed that enough time had passed, and that the wounds had crusted over enough, for them to accept a public retelling of their marriage through a play that is fictionalized in certain details, but preserves the shape and emotional flow of the actual breakup. The play’s passionate but dauntingly demanding wife pushes and prods her detached, placid, ill-matched mate to open up and become emotionally engaged in the marriage. Instead, he retreats into the arms of another. The distraught wife tries to save the marriage. The husband wants only to cut his losses and find some peace and comfort after years of unhappiness. The son becomes their reluctant liaison and confessor.

Nicholson says his parents read the script and consented, their comments limited to rather tangential details, both failing to see the true emotional effect of what he had written.

They saw the play -- separately -- when it premiered in England in 1999. His father, now 85, said and revealed little, that being his nature. His mother, Nicholson says, was “completely stunned,” but not offended.

“I tried very hard, because I love them both, to present the feelings and dilemmas of each in a way as sympathetic as possible,” he says. “It’s about two good people causing each other tremendous pain.”

When “The Retreat From Moscow” opened in New York last fall, with John Lithgow and Eileen Atkins as the warring couple, critics were as divided as the marriage the play depicted. The New Yorker’s John Lahr celebrated it as a work of “subtle and powerful evocation” and “marvelous emotional complexity,” and Howard Kissel in the Daily News hailed it as “that Broadway rarity, a play for adults, challengingly written and performed.” But others, including Ben Brantley in the New York Times and Linda Winer in Newsday, found it a dreary slog with nothing new or insightful to say about an ultra-familiar subject.

Nicholson -- who graduated from Cambridge and embarked on a career creating documentaries for the BBC -- says such a split in opinion was inevitable.

“The material is so universal that everybody’s response is conditioned by their own life experience,” he says. He expects those who identify with the characters to be shattered, and those who don’t to perhaps tune out. The shattered ones, Nicholson hopes, will grasp the plea for emotional honesty embedded in the play and see the consequences of not knowing or saying what one wants from a marriage.

Martin Benson, the South Coast artistic director who is staging “The Retreat From Moscow,” thinks the Costa Mesa version, with Linda Gehringer and Nicholas Hormann as the parents, may provide a more hopeful vision than the one his friend Daniel Sullivan directed on Broadway. “I hope people don’t get the idea that ‘It’s about divorce, I don’t want to see it.’ ” Benson says. “It’s dazzling to watch [the mother] finally finding her way back to the world.”

Nicholson, 56, says witnessing parental combat probably made it hard for him to commit in relationships. But he thinks he also gained insights that enabled him to seize happiness when he found a woman who could pierce his guard. His wife, Virginia, also a writer, is named for her great-aunt, Virginia Woolf; they have three children and, says Nicholson, “thank God, an extraordinarily happy marriage.”

He discontinued his diary 16 years ago when he married. “It was like I didn’t need it anymore. I have somebody to talk to.”

Curtain rises on next act

He’s in a fertile period for novels now, having begun another children’s fantasy series while awaiting the U.S. release in January of his novel for adults, “The Society of Others.” Another grown-up novel, “The Book of True Love,” a deliberately Jane Austen-like scenario in which a man has to choose between the more sizzling and the more compatible of two possible partners, is done, and he is well into another, tentatively called “Countryville,” that he says contemplates “the forming of a happy marriage.”

Nicholson still talks to Hollywood about possible film projects, but his success as a novelist has given him leeway to be very picky. There is no new play on his plate, but he expects that eventually there will be.

In “The Retreat From Moscow,” the mother, Alice, latches on to the vision of Napoleon’s disaster in a hostile wasteland as an emblem of the toll exacted by her marriage’s destruction, and Edward, the father, makes it his symbol of the need to claw for survival at any cost. Nicholson thinks it’s telling that his alter ego in the play, Jamie, rejects that death’s-grip view of emotional life. Instead, he invokes the landscape where he grew up and still lives, the rolling English hills called the Downs. The character sees himself crossing the slopes in his parents’ footsteps, learning about life’s possibilities from the course they chart. And so does the playwright.

“I am the child trotting behind, they are the pioneers,” Nicholson says. “I look to them to tell me how I can endure.”

*

‘The Retreat From Moscow’

Where: South Coast Repertory’s Julianne Argyros Stage, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa

When: Opens Friday. 7:45 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays; 2 p.m. and 7:45 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays

Ends: Oct. 17

Price: $27 to $56

Contact: (714) 708-5555