1. The Kreutzer Sonata
2. The Rise And Fall Of Little Voice
3. Endgame
4. Annie Get Your Gun
5. Bedroom Farce

London,

Close Encounter with exquisite but doomed affair

By Nicholas de Jongh, Evening Standard  18.02.08

The craze for converting famous films into stage plays takes an experimental turn with this fascinating adaptation of Noel Coward's classic Forties weepie, Brief Encounter.

Thanks to a shrewd marketing ploy the production is in a cinema, restored to theatrical use for the event, with an unheard of first Sunday matinee and a Sunday first night marking the rarity of the experience.

Emma Rice's Kneehigh company gives inventive, expressionistic treatment to Coward's Milford railway refreshment room.

Here the sparks of extra-marital passion are first ignited by a little bit of grit, inducing "agony" when it flies into the eye of respectable house-wife, Naomi Frederick's nicely-dressed Laura, complete with a prim, repressed hair-do and matching face.

Who can resist the words of Tristan Sturrock's gentlemanly GP, Alec in his respectable mackintosh, wide-brimmed hat and dated, BBC announcer voice. "I happen to be a doctor," he says while blousy Myrtle, the refreshment room manageress, flutters uselessly around.

Miss Rice's production and adaptation, sensibly faithful to the film rather than Coward's short-play Still Life, never mocks or caricatures the would-be, guilty lovers or the inherent improbability of their frustrated romance, which could have been simply consummated in a hotel.

Neil Murray's dream-struck, expressionistic design solves the problems posed by myriad locations.

Video film fades out the refreshment room, whose counter is the top of an upright piano, and wafts us onto the station platform or dissolves into Laura's home where her portly husband turns down the Rachmaninoff second piano concerto, its wistful sadness echoing hers.

A railway bridge becomes the borrowed room where the lovers are interrupted before there is even any coitus. And recurrent video images of surging waves remind us in heavy-handed fashion that what is repressed in the end breaks out.

Miss Rice's relish for theatrical pyrotechnics does sometimes become a flamboyant distraction from the main event.

When the lovers swing on chandeliers, when a watering can and tin bath are used to mimic rain-fall, when Laura's children are impersonated by puppets you become too conscious of Rice's self-reflexive cleverness.

And Coward's working-class romancers, Tamzin Griffin's aspirant Myrtle, Amanda Lawrence's Beryl and Stuart McLoughlin's gormless Stanley are played rather too broadly for conviction.

Yet the production eloquently catches the repressed, self-destructive aspect of mid-Forties, middle England sexuality.

Coward's beautiful songs, often sung with pathos on the banjo, are threaded through the action to enhance the lovers' jolting sense of sadness.

The exquisite scene in the boathouse, where wet clothes are shed and the lovers embrace with furtive delight to the ironic song Go Slow Johnny or the display of English manners in a grand café where Laura and her defecting lover are separated by an intrusive friend, resonate with frustration.

Miss Frederick's fine Laura reeks of disappointment though she lacks Celia Johnson's devastating sense of grief.

Mr Sturrock's extraordinarily powerful, love-lorn GP struggles to keeps his emotions under drapes and finally sings A Room With A View in tones of hopeless yearning. A valuable theatrical Encounter.

Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.

Other reviews

[ 1 ] [ 2 ]

What's on today   What's on tomorrow

Receive our newsletter