A first-class ticket to nostalgia town
There are two fine shows about stiff upper lips this week, the first being an ingenious take on David Lean and Noel Coward’s 1945 film Brief encounter. emma e rice’s adaptation, which is being revived re at the empire Cinema on haymarket, London, Lo includes several old movie-style clips of footage, into which characters ‘climb’ by stepping through a curtain.
From the moment you arrive at the empire, you are somewhere between art forms. This is a picture house, but the ushers are performers in dated bell-boy caps and a musical quartet is soon strolling the aisles.
This classic love story gives us bored, pukka Laura who at a railway station meets Alec, a handsome doctor. Both are married. Laura keeps telling herself to be ‘sensible’ but there is no taming the sexual attraction.
Isabel Pollen (Laura) is, for me, even better than Celia Johnson was in the film. her bewilderment at the end is engrossing. Jim Sturgeon is very solid as Alec.
There are trademark touches from Ms rice (who also directs): miniature machines (a tiny train comes chuffing on stage), accordion music and affectionate bystanders who watch the tale unfold. The levity of two other love affairs, amid what we might call the mechanicals, gives the production a Shakespearean quality.
That celebrated rachmaninoff soundtrack is initially chorused a cappella, but when the violins come swooping in, complete with crashing waves, you will gasp.
Imaginative, concise, funny yet touching — this is theatre guaranteed to win round a whole new generation.
NINe pianos, their front covers removed so we can see the inner gubbins, are arranged in a crescent at the back of the stage for the Almeida’s revival of Tennessee Williams’s Summer And Smoke.
Those pianos are not only played, sometimes several at once, they are thumped, tapped and walked over to create dramatic sounds. Pretentious? Maybe, but it works.
The pianos are not the only upright things in this powerful evening. Williams’s heroine, Alma, is the well- to- do daughter of a small- town Mississippi pastor during the early 20th century.
Alma may seem unadventurous, but inside she burns with desire for next- door’s handsome boy, the unruly son of a doctor, John.
We, the audience, can see that they’d be a good match. Alma would calm John’s wildness and he would ignite her humanity. But she daren’t touch his body and he daren’t touch her soul. Patsy Ferran and Matthew Needham are superb as the young not-quite lovers.
rebecca Frecknall’s direction certainly grabs one’s attention, although some of the character doubling is unsatisfactory. Forbes Masson plays the fathers of both John and Alma, robbing the play of some of its character richness, although great credit to the veteran Masson for his singing.
My heart might have fallen for the story even more had period and place been more strongly asserted. Smalltown USA in summer suffocates in a particular way, and there is little sense of that. But there is much else: the sadness of humans accepting second best, and brilliant details by Williams such as the distant admirer who knows that her heart’s desire wears gardenia talcum on his unkissable neck.