Brief Encounter (Not the film!) review
I don’t think I’ve seen anything better on the London stage.
Playing at (of all places) Cineworld Haymarket, Kneehigh are keen advertise it as A PLAY and not the 1944 John Lean film. Yet it’s not the original Noel Coward play either but a conflation of the two. So it’s a play of the film of the play. This was a disappointment for about five minutes; I chose this on the basis of rounding out my education of a film I saw for the first time only last year, which delighted me at the time and haunted me ever since.
But then it’s all about ‘experience’ these days isn’t it? Brand experience, user experience and so on (well it is for me anyway) and the experience for this show is present before, after and during the show (including the interval!). No sooner had I entered the auditorium to the sound of a serenading banjo quartet and in-costume ushers than I was won over entirely. During the “intermission”, the band resumed (on stage now) and other actors came round with buns (baked freshly this morning!) and cucumber sandwiches.
Parts of the production were done in film, but crucially not the film (and how could they? — the last thing the leads need is the audience being reminded of the eternal Johnson/Howard performances which they can never hope to match — at best reinvent) but instead projected imagery Laura’s repression, her longed-for freedom and sexual expression symbolised through the crashing waves and liberating swimming of (I know learn) the half seal/half woman Selkie whose desires cannot be fully achieved in human form.
The stage is used highly imaginitvely, not least through the on/off-stage band (more below) but in how they create the railway station, the tremble and gusts of wind as trains pass through, train guards catching the main protaganists as they swoon, literally fall for each other, at their first meeting and picking them back up into their respectable middle-class family lives.
The intensity and repression of the main characters’ burgeoning love is contrasted by bawdy musical-hall numbers and sub-plot involving more simplistic love between the four train staff. Each of whom are probably the stars of the show, Andy Williams especially — turning in three different performances, including Laura’s devoted but tragically dull husband, all utterly sincere and three-dimensional portrayals of riskily stock characters.
But it’s the music that singles out Rice’s Brief Encounter as a unique and superior achievement. The actors are also the band, taking it in turns to provide both incidental music and accompaniment to the main numbers. Ukelele-led love songs — that’s a first. It’s Stuart McLoughlin, with his ingenuous tenor tones, who consistently yet subtly steals the moment, and at the most unexpected moments: when he enters as a squaddie in a scene that later unsettles the safe sanctuary of the cafe, his duet lulls us into misty daydaream as they sing of homesickness and lost love. What takes the biscuit however, is when Tristan Sturrock (Dr. Alec — the sodding lead actor for God’s sake!!) — saunters over to the band following a stage exit, picks up the double bass and starts plinking away!
Apparently a good many of these songs are Noel Coward’s himself which is a splendid touch but alas nearly wasted on me (I wouldn’t have recognised a single one).
Rach 2 is played but not as per the relentless usage of the film and not until the second half, twice. First when they first kiss on the train platform — and its use is entirely appropriate. Its second appearance is during the final scene and with this choice they risk ruining the magic of the whole play; in fact I wish Rice had rethought this scene. Bascially, as the lovers part, unconsummated and desolate, Laura sits at the piano and — you guessed it — launches into the opening chords of the piano concerto. Yet she doesn’t really: she’s miming. And this calls into doubt everything we’ve heard and seen tonight. Given what a feat and novelty it is to have performers who can act convincingly, sing to melt the hardest of hearts and then go and play multiple instruments — why does the director risk the audience concluding “Oh, so they mimed throughout! That makes sense!”
All is forgiven soon after though: bows and frenzied ovations over, the full company, led by McLoughlin on banjo, croon “Room with a View”. The pathos of the play is distilled into the final moments where the banjo drops out and McLoughlin is accompanied tenderly in four part harmony from all the company. Clearly live, clearly sublime.
Like “good design”, the music here is nearly invisible (paradoxically, given the nature of its staging) — and this is the only reason I can think that most critics have failed to applaud it.
It’s no great surprise that I enjoyed Brief Encounter on the stage — given the enduring effect the movie had on me — but I didn’t expect it to surpass the film and even less so equal anything I’ve so far seen on the West End. They’ve taken a classic and made it more classic.
Categories: Music
