The unshakable middle classes of England are the resilient backbone of the country itself. They are an island nation accustomed to drizzle. By rainy temperament, they like nothing more than a good moan; it cheers everyone up. They are the masters of survival in gloomy defeat. As I recall from my own English childhood, there used to be a BBC radio family known as the Glums. The Glums were-well, glum. They were-to put it the understated English way-somewhat on the glum side. They were very popular. I thought they were dead. They're back!

Now, how the Glums ended up on Broadway only goes to prove that the middle-class miseries of England can't be killed off. They rise like the phoenix. No power on earth has ever been able to rid the English stage of them, and now they've hopped the pond to be with us again in William Nicholson's wan domestic saga, The Retreat from Moscow , at the Booth. This is very good news if you wish to have a nice long doze at the theater. The seasonal burst of Anglophilia is underway, and the Glums, I'm happy to report, are as glum as ever.

They come with a cultural gloss that pleases the unchallenged theatergoer who was famously defined by Terence Rattigan as Aunt Edna. The Retreat from Moscow is an elderly, somewhat doddering relative of Rattigan's 1940's and 50's dramas of tortured romantic tragedy, The Browning Version and The Deep Blue Sea . Aunt Edna was Rattigan's beloved ideal theatergoer, and he came to regret his role in her immaculate conception as the conscience of English theater. He described her, without irony, as "a nice respectable, middle-aged lady," "a hopeless lowbrow" who Knows What She Likes.

Aunt Edna personifies everything contentedly shallow about the bourgeois theater of England. That the smug old broad still appears to be breathing is a miracle. The Retreat from Moscow 's patina of "class" and "quality"-like the English box of chocolates named Quality Street nestling in Aunt Edna's lap-is meant to divert us from the sleepy, unsurprising ritual actually happening onstage. Alice, the wronged, thoroughly middle-class heroine of The Retreat from Moscow , is thus a poetry lover given to reciting poetry to a hushed silence (Robert Frost, George Herbert, Rossetti, etc.). The poems are intended to elevate Mr. Nicholson's overfamiliar lowbrow saga into a highbrow elegy by filling in the gaps.

If not poetry, historic metaphor: In the opening scene, Edward-the beaten hero of the play, a history teacher teetering wearily on the edge of retirement-reads a passage from a scholarly book about the mortal price paid by Napoleon's troops during their retreat from Moscow in 1812. Aha! Edward-we know it, and he knows it-is about to retreat from his doomed marriage in order to survive, like Napoleon's troops. And so, in his lumbering metaphorical way, he does.

Mr. Nicholson's better-known play of tragic love, Shadowlands , was set in an Oxford college and decked out culturally, too. By telling the story of the spinsterish Christian C.S. Lewis and his love affair with a dying New York Jewish poet, the playwright managed to combine the pretty shameless soap opera of Shadowlands with ecumenicalism, donnish discourse and that reliable old walk-on, God. You were meant to have a good cry, in a spiritual sort of way. But I remember the 1990 Broadway production principally for Nigel Hawthorne, a great British actor belatedly in the glorious making. The late Hawthorne joyfully carried the play, but I'm afraid that with The Retreat from Moscow , even the beady intelligence of the estimable Dame Eileen Atkins, as well as the skills of her co-stars, John Lithgow and the British movie actor Ben Chaplin, can't save it from sinking into the glums.

The play's crossword-loving historian, Edward the Dull (Mr. Lithgow), who likes a nice, soothing cuppa whenever possible, eventually confesses the agonized news to Alice the Drab (Ms. Atkins), his poetry-spouting wife of 30 or a hundred years, that he's fallen in love with Another Woman who doesn't mind him doing crossword puzzles. Jamie the Grim (Mr. Chaplin), their woebegone son, who's already turning humorlessly into his dry stick of a dad, gets upset, but not too much.

God comes on early, after Napoleon and Robert Frost. "You can say you don't believe in God till you're blue in the face," churchgoing Alice argues with her agnostic son. "But He's still there." He is indeed. He's looking down on Broadway thinking, "I prefer musicals." "I'd better not let my bath get cold," Jamie the Grim announces, closing the debate about why God allows a world that's "full of miserable, starving, tortured, crippled people." "He gave us free will," Dad the Dull explains, drifting back to his crossword puzzle, glad to be out of it, glad to bury himself in tired suburban banality.

"I'm tired, too," Alice the Drab tells him later. "But we can't go on like this. This isn't the life I want. Is this the life you want?"

"Not exactly," says Dad.

"Then do something about it …. You see, I just can't bear what's happening to us any longer."

"I'm tired. I want to go bed. We'll talk about it in the morning," Dad says when the bickering begins all over again. But Mother Knows Best. The play has a number of weaknesses, though none is more serious than the unequal war between the parents. Obviously, Dad is no day at the beach, but I've a feeling the playwright wants us to believe that Alice is really an adorable "personality," an eccentric free spirit missing a passionate life. The problem is that almost everything out of her mouth conjures up the small-minded picture of a belittling nightmare nag. She has a mediocre mind. She resents her lot. She blackmails her retreating husband in the name of love. When he summons up the courage to tell her at last that he's leaving, who among us doesn't think, "Finally! And God's speed!"

If it's John Lee Beatty, it's trees. Mr. Beatty's set for Retreat from Moscow is characterized by his customary forest, though here the branches are dry and bare as a bone, appearing to envelop the anonymous, sterile sitting room. Is the barren landscape possibly, by any chance, another metaphor? Are the dead trees the Glums? But was the marriage of Edward and the now half-mad Lucy ever juicy in the first place? As Dad the Dull rationalizes philosophically in his own mesmerizing fashion: He got on the wrong train, and now he's got off the train. And to that I say, "God's speed, Edward! And good luck!" The evening is directed by Daniel Sullivan at a slow, stately pace, lest Aunt Edna miss anything as she dips hopefully into her box of Quality Street for one last, comforting chockie.

Witty and slick, this second feature by British director Jez ( Mojo ) Butterworth is a deceptively clever romantic comedy that is also part caper, part thriller and a perfect vehicle for both Ms. Kidman and her talented co-star, Ben Chaplin. He plays John Buckingham, a dull, nerdy bank clerk for whom every day is Monday. Lonely and desperately unlucky in love, John swallows his pride and surfs the Web for a Russian mail-order bride. She's Nicole Kidman-a pale, chain-smoking goth who doesn't speak a word of English. He takes her home, but it's a disaster.

While his emergency calls to the Internet agency that set them up go unanswered, Nadia rifles through his apartment and finds his porno tapes, seductively fulfilling his secret sexual fantasies. But domestic bliss is shattered by the arrival of Nadia's two male "cousins," who show up unannounced to celebrate her birthday. They turn violent, demand money and threaten to kill her. Naïve but honorable, John robs his own bank to save her life, innocently unaware that Nadia is part of the gang.

John is just the latest victim in a string of gullible men they've robbed. John's life is turned upside-down, but this movie is just getting started. The gang breaks up and John's rage turns to pity for the broke, abandoned and pregnant Nadia. With the police in hot pursuit, the mild-mannered nerd has to track down the thugs, rescue the girl, recover the stolen money, and restore his dignity and reputation. But if you think movies still separate the good guys from the villains in time for a happy resolution, you have amnesia. Nothing ends the way you expect it to in Birthday Girl , and the biggest shock of all is yet to come. Whatever else you might think, you can't label it predictable.

As the dour, repressed and anally retentive John, Mr. Chaplin creates a memorable portrait of a perfect Mr. Nice Guy, surprising even himself with the kind of doughy bravado he must summon to save the day and get the girl. Ms. Kidman is gorgeous even with black, stringy hair and a wardrobe so ugly Courtney Love wouldn't wear it on a dare in broad daylight. She's also sexually fearless, and her Russian is flawless. Vincent Cassel and Mathieu Kassovitz, as the scruffy Soviet dudes who keep the action moving, lend powerful support. Not a great movie, but a quirky, agreeable and most entertaining one that further validates my faith in Nicole Kidman as that rarest of film creations-an actress of great beauty and startling versatility who is unafraid to take risks, never rests on her laurels, and strives to be more than just another pretty face.

Something

To Forget

Drowning in marshmallow fluff soured by bubble-gum rock, the teenage tearjerker A Walk to Remember is as riveting as a cement floor and as predictable as plum sauce in a Chinese restaurant. Shane West, a teeny-bopper cover boy who can actually act (on ABC's wonderful Once and Again , he has more than held his own every week opposite some of the best actors on the tube), specializes in troubled, rebellious, antisocial teenagers with an underlying decency. He plays another one here, but, without sensitive and naturalistic dialogue, he's lost as a clam at sea.

In the opening scene, he's established as a rich, spoiled North Carolina high-school hunk who goads a blindfolded classmate into jumping off a bridge, then smashes up his convertible (red, natch) in the ensuing police chase. As part of his punishment, he is forced to play the lead in the school musical opposite a minister's daughter who helps others, sings in the church choir and reads the Bible. This dork is played by a gooey, catatonic singer named Mandy Moore, who, I was informed by the teenagers around me at the press screening, also works as a host on MTV. She is strongly urged to hold onto her day job.

To make a torturously long story mercifully short, the impishly cool dude and the insufferably nice minister's daughter gag their way through the kind of romantic idealism that makes exemplary citizens out of them both. She learns that there is more to life than elevator music and homework; he learns patience, kindness, selflessness and the value of lip-locking. Then the cookie jar breaks, and a mysterious Ali MacGraw movie disease crawls out of the cracks.

Shane West deserves better material than the soporific script by Karen Janszen and stronger professional guidance than the lame direction by Adam Shankman. Mandy Moore is simply awful in a role that Katie Holmes was too smart to play. The wasted adults in this forgettable fiasco are Peter Coyote as the girl's overprotective father and a bewilderingly haggard Daryl Hannah as the boy's divorced mother, now looking like one of the undead in a zombie movie. A Walk to Remember is so boring that even its target audience talked all the way through it. "He's got crabs," "She's gonna die" and "Uh-oh, it's a walk to forget" were some of the teenage comments near me. The credits claim the movie was based on a novel by Nicholas Sparks. If that's true, it must be the kind of book that is best read aloud-to the deaf.

Who Is This

Carson McCullers?

Carson McCullers, a friend and adviser whose personal courage was as inspirational to me as her literary output, was one of the dozen or so American writers to reach the top echelons of greatness. She used to greet me at the door of her house in Nyack-a Southern Gothic Victorian job the color of vanilla ice cream and across the street from Helen Hayes and the Methodist Church-in long white nightgowns and tennis shoes. Everything about her was as eccentric, lost and lonely as any of the tortured characters she created in short stories, plays and novels like The Member of the Wedding , The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter , Reflections in a Golden Eye and The Ballad of the Sad Café .

She was a legend almost from the beginning-a wiry slip of a girl with bangs and a crooked-tooth grin in a baseball cap who, at 17, arrived in New York from Georgia to become a concert pianist, lost her tuition money to Juilliard on the subway, and ended up in a boarding house for sailors on the Brooklyn waterfront. When her first novel was published in 1940, she became the troubled darling of fashionable people like Edith Sitwell and Cecil Beaton and helped establish an arty salon in an old Brooklyn brownstone called February House, where the boarders included Christopher Isherwood, Paul and Jane Bowles, Richard Wright, Thomas Mann's son Golo, Oliver Smith and Gypsy Rose Lee. W.H. Auden kept house, and they all chipped in on groceries to feed Leonard Bernstein, Anaïs Nin, Marc Blitzstein, Aaron Copland and Salvador Dalí.

After falling victim to a conspiracy of troubles, she suffered, at 23, the first in a series of strokes that led to pneumonia, paralysis, temporary blindness, cancer, rheumatic fever, acute cardiac failure and everything but the will to endure. Still she drank champagne and ate raw oysters with Isak Dinesen, kept a room upstairs for Tennessee Williams, danced on a marble tabletop with Marilyn Monroe in her arms until the table collapsed, and wrote one final novel with one finger on a broken typewriter. I was granted the last interview she ever gave, shortly before she died in 1967. The New York Times called it "Frankie Addams at 50." I always felt there was a great and fascinating play to be written about this colorful oddball with piercing vision and a soul like a chalice of compassion for all the pain and suffering in the human heart. Carson McCullers (Historically Inaccurate) by Sarah Schulman, staged by the Women's Project and Playwright's Horizon, is not it.

It's historically inaccurate, all right. Also dramatically incoherent to the point of incomprehensibility and theatrically dead on arrival. The facts are wrong, the characters invented, the dialogue imbecilic, the direction by Marion McClinton practically bizarre to the point of surrealism. The whole thing trashes the memory of a great writer without a flicker of enlightened knowledge. Carson was once described by Truman Capote as "diagonally parked in a parallel universe," but she was not a raving, violent, suicidal, self-pitying lesbian trading vulgar sex stories with Ethel Waters during the rehearsals for The Member of the Wedding or trying to seduce some fictional actress playing Frankie Addams. Julie Harris, who made history in the role onstage and on-screen, should sue.

The only reason to wince your way through this sorry and miserable mistake is the luminous performance by Jenny Bacon, who captures the essence of a tormented sparrow with broken wings and a flame of genius flickering brightly from deep within (and even looks like Carson). Ms. Bacon is full of fire and pain and passion. Everything else is a mess. I'm not the only one who thinks so. It's closing Feb. 3, and not a moment too soon, if you ask me.