Jason Sherman’s play The Retreat is receiving its European premiere at the Finborough, after 27 years when it was acclaimed in his native Canada.  It is about Rachel Benjamin (Jill Winternitz) a Canadian Jewish school teacher from Toronto who has ambitions to be a screenwriter.  She has been asked to apologise at school after offence was taken regarding her remarks about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  Before she has to make a decision she goes on a screenwriting course called The Retreat.  

Her critical thinking tutor on The Retreat is also from Toronto which has one of the largest Jewish communities outside Israel and the USA after 40,000 Holocaust survivors moved there. He is David Fine (Max Rinehart) who looks not unlike the handsome Aidan Turner. David Fine is in a screenwriting, film producing partnership with Jeff Bloom (Michael Feldsher).  Jeff wants David to work on a script for a blatantly commercial teen horror movie but David is resisting because he is more interested in a script sent to him by Rachel.  

Early on in the play David says there are only three stories, “the search for redemption, the search for faith and the search for love”.   Rachel’s script is set in 1665 about a rabbi who is thought to be the actual Messiah and who develops hundreds of Kabbalah followers but who is captured by agents of the Ottoman Empire and is given the choice of death or conversion to Islam.  While David’s interest in Rachel is initially literary, it soon becomes sexual and of course the residential retreat in Calgary provides the opportunity for David away from his wife and two children.