Powerful and moving Brief Encounters show

WHILE all the fun and frolics of Loughborough’s annual pantomime was taking place in the Town Hall, in the smaller Victoria Room on the second floor of the building a more sombre performance was taking place, The Festival Players production of Brief Encounter (On Air).

This is best known in the classic 1945 film, starring Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson, both married, and who meet on a railway station and begin a relationship which is doomed from the word go.

Here the Festival Players set it as a BBC Radio production just after the Second World War, with this radio production being made around Christmas, with decorations of that time. The stage is a radio studio with the performers in dress of the time, the three male actors in dinner jacket and bow tie, with the engineer and sound effects man also portrayed on stage.

The screenplay was written by Noel Coward, with David Lean directing the film. Adapted for radio by Roy Marsden, the Festival Players stay very close to the film story, and all the better for it.

The principal role is that of Laura, a middle-class woman, and Laura Brookes gives a fine interpretation of a respectable British woman in a stable marriage, with children, but torn when meeting a doctor called Alec, Nick Grainger in this role.

Mr Grainger brings great feeling to his role and captures the moment with pathos when he tells Laura they have fallen in love, which Laura does not deny.

The company is eight in number, with the rest of the company doubling, and in some cases tripling, up in the different roles required.

Set designer Andrew McGowan has put together a good portrayal of a radio studio, while director Sally Bruton has captured the feel of the time in which events take place.

If one was to see films and plays of this period, various speech mannerisms are displayed, with the ‘gor blimey’ of the railway platform staff to the clipped speech of Alec, Laura and her husband, and the company captures them superbly in this fine production.

Overall, a fine production of a powerful and moving play, capturing a time and the morals and ways of that period.