BRIEF ENCOUNTER
BRIEF ENCOUNTER, Kneehigh Theatre at The Concourse, Chatswood via Arts Projects Australia, 1-17 November, Illawarra Performing Arts Centre, Wollongong, 20-24 November, The Regal, Perth November 28 to December 8, 2013. Photography by Zoe Coates and Steve Tanner: Jim Sturgeon and Michelle Nightingale. Right: Annette McLaughlin and Joe Alessi.
This is Kneehigh's third visit to Sydney after their first with rumbustious, eye-opening Tristan and Yseult (Sydney Festival 2006) and the second with the creepily fantastic The Red Shoes (also Sydney Festival, 2011). This time they're here with Brief Encounter under the auspices of Arts Projects Australia and the new(ish) Concourse theatre complex - anxious to nail their theatrical colours to the mast - on a national tour that's already taken in successful visits to Adelaide and the Melbourne Festival. And so...
The idea of Noel Coward's most fragile romance in the hands of this wildly original and imaginative outfit - in the person of its artistic co-boss and unifying presence Emma Rice - is both startling and exciting. And that's exactly how it turns out to be. The post-show opening night audience heard that when Rice was being asked what she wanted to do next she didn't have a clue but spotted the Brief Encounter DVD on a shelf. "I've always wanted to adapt that," she said. And so it came to pass and she has.
For fans of the Master, it's important to know that Rice went back to the original 1936 short play, Still Life, consequently this stage production is neither a pastiche nor movie-to-stage rendition of the 1945 Celia Johnson-Trevor Howard Laura and Alec weepy, rather it incorporates the text and characters of the former and the visual world of the latter. The result is a rich and unexpected melange of poignancy and humour, music and drama. (Various Coward songs, verse and lyrics have also been incorporated to good effect.)
Rice has tickled all kinds of cinematic and theatrical memories with this show. For instance, it begins with echoes of Woody Allen's Purple Rose of Cairo and a lovely coup de theatre that has people gasping and chuckling. It continues on a set that combines projection screens, a railway bridge, the station cafe and Laura's dreary middle class sitting room that's so sparely authentic you can almost smell the coal dust, lino, lousy tea and stale cakes (design Neil Murray, lighting Malcolm Rippeth).
For those who've missed the David Lean classic on late night TV, Brief Encounter is what happens in the Kardomah Cafe on a Home Counties railway station platform when housewife Laura (Michelle Nightingale) gets a smut in her eye and Dr. Alec (Jim Sturgeon) gets it out. Their stitched up, hopelessly tentative attraction is drawn out over a year and a once-weekly cup of tea and reluctantly nibbled bun. It's excruciatingly middle class in the hopeless way of pre-WW2 England and made even more so by the contrastingly ribald working class slap and tickle going on behind them.
Station master Albert (Joe Alessi) and Kardomah manager Myrtle (Annette McLaughlin) play ping pong with social niceties, batting them back and forth with sexy gusto. Myrtle is as wretchedly posh as Mrs Slocombe when she remembers and as bawdy as they come when she doesn't. In a sweet piece of doubling and fine acting Alessi - the louche Lothario with a whistle and a flag - is also Laura's cardigan-wearing, pipe-smoking, perfectly decent bore of a husband.
Romantic, unfettered youth is also represented by saucy young waitress Beryl (Kate Cheels) and her beau, the rapscallion run-about Stanley (Damon Daunno) who also doubles as the company troubadour. Music and dance are interspersed throughout, as are fragments of creamy, crackly, black and white film that throw up fleeting scenes of happiness between Laura and Alec as well as the humdrum domesticity of her home life.
By juxtaposing scenes of longing and pathos with moments of levity and broad comedy - Laura wrings out her sodden blouse, in the background Beryl makes the sound effect by wringing a cloth into a bucket - the overall effect is to heighten and intensify the drama while undercutting the original's tendency to melodrama. It's exceedingly clever and effective and a reminder of why Emma Rice is such a powerful theatrical force.
The performances are equally powerful and intelligent in their different ways. Alessi and McLaughlin shine, revelling in raw material that's there for the grabbing. They restore a broad human balance to the piece that was missing from David Lean's tearjerker movie. Likewise Cheels and Daunno are charming and sharply in tune with the production. The spotlight is most often on the central pair, however, and Sturgeon and Nightingale manage to both honour and go beyond the fabled stars of 1945.
Joining the cast at relatively short notice (they were auditioned and got the gigs in August) Kate Cheels and Michelle Nightingale have slipped with deceptive effortlessness into the Kneehigh milieu and it's a major achievement for cabaret artiste Nightingale. She captures Laura's heartbreaking combination of brittle rectitude and lissome carefree passion. In a dreamy scene she and Alec dance a tango. It's bracketed by filmed sequences of crashing waves and her alter ego swimming with all the energy and freedom that's forbidden to her in real life. Wonderful stuff.
This Brief Encounter is a rich and deeply entertaining work of theatre and we're really lucky to have Kneehigh back to visit. Don't let them down: go see it.
