Review - Brief Encounter: I'll See You Again?

For decades, the great and not-so-great vocal artists of cabarets and nightclubs have put their own personal spins on the songs of the sumptuous Noel Coward catalogue; changing a tempo here, adjusting a rhythm there. Similarly, adaptor/director Emma Rice makes a marvelous party out of her theatrical riff on Coward's bitter sweet one-act romance, Still Life, by way of the play's 1945 film version, Brief Encounter. The happy result is a stage play where characters occasionally dissolve into glorious black and white screen images or evolve into musicAl Hall entertainers singing commentary on the tense and understated love story.

Set primarily in and around a suburban train station café, Brief Encounter offers the tale of Laura, (Hannah Yelland), a bored wife and mother who, by chance, meets a handsome stranger in a trench coat (Tristan Sturrock), also married. Though they pretend to be simply striking up a friendship, emotions are swept away by a romance filled with crashing waves, chugging locomotives and fizzy champagne toasts (Simon Baker contributes the excellent and detailed sound design).

What gives the production its interesting kick is that Rice keeps the central characters in an intimate world where visuals speak louder than words (dialogue is at a minimum) while they're surrounded by broader characters played with spotlight-hogging pizzazz as they occasionally halt the proceedings to sing a ditty or two like "Mad About The Boy," "Any Little Fish" or "A Room With a View." With her hip-swiveling allure, Annette McLaughlin threatens to walk away with the show as the frisky manager of the café enjoying madcap hijinks with the genial stationmaster (Joseph Alessi), while the perky Dorothy Atkinson and the gangly Gabriel Ebert shyly experience youthful attraction.

Proving once more that Noel Coward wrote sexier scenes for clothed people that most playwrights could with naked ones, the evening's steamy highlight comes in a moment where Yelland and Sturrock, alone together at last, finally reach the "will we or won't we" point. With the company singing Stu Barker's soft ukulele arrangement of "Go Slow, Johnny" in the background, the tension is elegantly unbearable.

While morals of the day (at least in film entertainment) make the ending more than obvious (though no less enchanting in Rice's captivating staging) those who are wiping their tears by curtain call can have a good cheer-up from the company's rousing little post-show musical performance held across from the theatre's bar. Plan to stay an extra twenty minutes. You'll won't want to leave.

Photos by Joan Marcus: Top: Hannah Yelland and Tristan Sturrock; Bottom: Annette McLaughlin and Joseph Alessi.

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