A Review of Brief Encounter

It looks like Brief Encounter. It sounds like Brief Encounter. But this play, a major success for  Kneehigh, is not Brief Encounter. Rather, it is Emma Rice's fantasia on a theme: a glorious two-hour riot of fun and theatrical magic, that broadens the original story to include previously peripheral characters, but in doing so loses some of the melancholy and despair that made Coward's original film so memorable.

The play tells three parallel stories of love before wartime: Laura and Alec who embark on a a guilt-ridden and stiff upper lipped affair, Myrtle (who runs the station cafe) and Albert (the station master) who indulge in a bit of convenient slap-and-tickle, and Beryl and Stanley, the two young people who represent the live-for-the-moment, inoccent spirit of the young. However, these stories often seem incidental to what functions as a musical review circa 1931: from the pre-show larks of a jazz band and roaming actors dressed as ushers on the stalls and staircases, this is a play that is more in love with theatricality and cinematics than in its characters. Not that this is a downside to the production: rather, its greatest moments of joy are to be found in the characters' singing of Noel Coward standards and accompyaning physical theatre, not least in the those played by Dean Nolan, a riot of comedic panache. However this comedy is unbalanced with the central story's serious tone, and the actors sometimes find it difficult to shift between the two, applying too much comedic timing to serious scenes and leadening comic ones. As a result you get a tonally unbalanced story which is simultaneously playfully artificial and deadly realistic- two modes of theatre which don't always sit entirely comfortably together.

Nevertheless, when there is a focus on the central lovers their two actors, Isabel Pollen and Jim Sturgeon, play up the thwarted romance perfectly. There is a great chemistry between the two, and in their few scenes together you can understand why they invest so much into their affair. This is especially apparent when the two enjoy a glass of champagne in a dining room: lifted into the air on candelabras, there is a sense of joy and freedom that cannot be found in Laura's life with her husband, Fred, and their two children, (sensitively played by puppeters which adds to the charm). Here Rice makes marvellous use of cinematic conventions to highlight the raging emotions beneath the surface: film of Laura swimming and of the two lovers on a boat projected behind the actors show a desperate desire for freedom and highten the artificiality of the piece further. Although this diminishes the role of the Rachmaninov Piano Concerto in the piece (not irritating to me but to my mum, a Brief Encounter purist) by substituting it for something more dramatic and cinematic, one leaves with the sense that whilst Laura has returned to a dull and uninteresting life, she has accessed a sense of personal liberty that cannot be confined, even if it is to be regretted for the rest of her life.

By transferring the play's focus from these two lovers and widening it to include lower-class characters, you could argue that some of the serious, heart-rending nature of the film is lost. However, what is gained is a breath of fresh air and fun: a riotous tumble of grotesques filled with sex and laughter, that provide a joyous contrast to the closed, guilt-ridden world of Alex and Laura. One gains a sense of a class system divided not only by economics but also by emotion: with a regional accent, clearly, comes a great deal more activity. Despite this, and the play's overall positive tone towards them, the lower-class characters do emerge as charicateures that dominate the piece rather than acting as a coda to the central love story. Indeed sometimes the incessant singing and jolity makes the piece rather cluttered, and though the cast make a good show of it (especially Beverly Rudd and Jos Slovick), all the puttering about on scooters and exaggerated thrusting does detract from any sense of melancholy and pathos produced by the main story.

This show is marvellous, entertaining, often tremendously sad and tremendously funny, and softly heartbreaking. What it is not, is Brief Encounter. Rather, for all its faults, it is a riotous entertainment with Brief Encounter going on in the background.