Brief Encounter
Noel Coward in a version by Emma Rice
Directed by Rob Ellis
Tower Theatre, Stoke Newington
Star rating: 3
I may be the only person in Britain who has never seen David Lean’s famous 1945 film of Noel Coward’s best-known story of thwarted love. Of course, however, I have seen and heard snippets of the dialogue, and I knew that the film put Rachmaninov’s second piano concerto firmly and permanently on the popular culture map,
Normally I get a bit weary of the every-film-must-be made-into-a-musical mentality but Emma Rice’s (2008) take on Brief Encounter feels fresh and innovative. It is actually more of a play with songs and lots of evocative background music than a true musical.
So let’s start with the pleasing on-stage live band which is already playing when the audience enters. It is ably led on keys by Tower Theatre veteran, Jonathan Norris but he should not be singing in public as he does in the 15 minutes before the show goes up. Colin Guthrie, however – a talented and versatile musician, delights with one of the sassiest accounts of Coward’s timeless “There are bad times just around the corner” that I’ve heard in a while. Thereafter they accompany the odd song on stage and provide a filmic sound track. All eight cast members are reasonable singers with an exceptionally fine performance from Imogen Front as Beryl. Her duets with Tom Lafferty as Stanley are excellently done. You can hear every harmony and, as a flirty pair, they play well off each other.
At the heart of this story, as nearly everyone knows. is a middle-aged couple who meet in a railway station buffet and fall in love. Clandestine meetings follow. Eventually, not least because each has a perfectly decent spouse and children, they part and go their separate ways – cue for lots of Rachmaninov. The cast sings a rather nice reference to it in a wordless arrangement and we hear a grandiloquent recording at the end after Victoria Flint’s Laura has soulfully played the first few notes on Norris’s piano.
Flint gets the mannered middle class 1945 accent perfectly – stand to rhyme with bend and house to rhyme with dice. Dom Ward’s Alec sounds less convincing. She gazes dreamily into the distance effectively while he brings a lot of attentive warmth. The details niggle though. In the mid 1940s she would have worn nylons and suspenders rather than tights and a respected GP would not have been covered in tattoos but these are minor gripes.
The support cast is strong as they work through the two other relationships in the plot which have a future, unlike the one between Laura and Alec. Matthew Vickers is a convincing cheeky station employee who has the hots for Deborah Ley’s lively buffet manageress – there’s lots of stage business with tea and tea cups in this show. And the younger Beryl and Stanley represent love at its most straightforward. James Taverner is fun as the crossword-addicted Fred and Fiyin Ifebogun is splendid as the both the sulky waitress and the loquacious Dolly. Most of the cast has to multi-role.
A note of praise for Stephen Ley’s lighting design. It really illuminates the emotion by highlighting faces and bringing the station to life.
While not flawless, this show is a decently entertaining, and often imaginative, couple of hours of theatre.
