Review: THE RETREAT, Finborough Theatre

The recent years have shattered the public idea of a Hollywood that cherishes its artistry, its women, its craft. The reality of the film industry has, of course, never been anything but cruel to those who live it. Wealth and fame come to a price, whether this comes in the shape of compromise, mental health, or safety.

Movies are money-makers first, dream-machines second. Jason Sherman's 1996 play The Retreat sees a young Hebrew school teacher with screenwriting ambitions grapple with her artistic identity while two producing partners fight over her script and their vision for the company they founded after university. Their personal lives get obviously entangled and their integrity is challenged while Sherman's moralistic views on the business aspect of filmmaking try to coexist with his political vein.

Far from being the meaty two-hours-45-cum-interval, it chases its own tail in an exhausting, exasperating, overlong, and overblown production directed by Emma Jude Harris. It's genuinely difficult to see the point of the play. Rachel is passionate about the role of Israel and is very precise in her politics, but Sherman keeps going on didactic tangents. He condenses years of film school instead of adding pace and traction to his theme. There's very little at stake.

The scenes plod along while they discuss the same topics over and over fruitlessly while the beats - those same famous "beats" the producers bang on - are predictable and unchallenging. Jeff (Michael Feldsher) and David (Max Rinehart) keep having tense heart-to-hearts about their differences, David and Rachel (The Sandman's Jill Winternitz) are in emotional turmoil due to their attraction, Rachel and her father Wolf (Jonathan Tafler) argue over Judaism and Palestine while he edges towards death. In all this, Rachel is rewriting the script that made David fall in love with her according to Jeff's notes, which are drastically different from David's, pragmatic and not at all artistic.

Feldsher is the highlight of the show as the high-strung, matter-of-fact Jeff. Where David lacks inspiration, faith, and direction, Feldsher becomes an unlikely voice of reason here rather than the villain. We're supposed to perceive him as this cut-throat, backstabbing shark, but Feldsher humanises him beautifully. Winternitz is comfortable and confident against Rinehart's David, whose character is passionately pretentious. While they lack comic timing and each attempt at comedy falls flat on its face, the romantic drama side of their performance is undeniably compelling.

While the actors are technically excellent with what they're given, one gets the impression that the Rinehart and Feldsher are slightly too young for the roles. David mentions he's been married for 15 years, but he looks the same age as Rachel, who's in her early 30s. There's something to say about his shameless flirting and the unbalanced student-teacher power dynamic, which would definitely come off differently if they'd cast an older man than Rinehart.

Director Jude Harris fails to find any subtext in the writing and discards all the feminist work that's been done in the three decades since the play's debut. Rachel's tirade about men's tendency to leave women with nothing when they're over their partners feels unfortunately out of place as well as being a terribly outdated angle. The self-important discussions on cinema that seem to be the real focus turn stale fairly quickly too (especially given that they circle the same handful of questions) and the political side is often offered as mere unexplored notions that mean quite little in the grand scheme of the plot.

The structure of the piece doesn't help the sluggish rhythm of its story either, with longer scenes preceding shorter ones that almost take less to play out than its set changes do. We could go on being as cruel as these two producers can be with other people's material, but that's not the aim here. Maybe they should have made a film so that we didn't have to review it.

The Retreat runs at Finborough Theatre until 13 May.

Photo Credit: Ali Wright

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