Get Out More.....................................Theatre Review

BRIEF ENCOUNTER (Birmingham Rep, until 20 October)

06-10-2007

Noel Coward's classic gets a makeover by Cornish mischief makers Kneehigh. Paula Elenor keeps her upper lip stiff.

The Birmingham Rep has certainly started its new season with a bang! It started with a brilliant new play "Rough Crossings" - now receiving rave reviews at the Lyric Hammersmith in London (we saw it first!) and now we are blessed with its current show - Noel Coward's "Brief Encounter" - co-produced by the inventive Kneehigh Theatre in association with the Rep and West Yorkshire Playhouse!

Prepare to laugh as our preconceptions of the 1945 film are gently mocked, guffaw at the musical hall style renditions of some of Coward's saucy songs and get hopelessly enmeshed in the uncertainties, joys and embarrassments of this classic tale of two respectable married middle -class suburbanites who fall in love when they meet by chance in a station buffet while waiting for their connecting trains.

With a reputation for quirky, energetic staging and the brilliant use of live music on stage, Kneehigh have managed to showcase Coward's perfectly pitched dialogue doing full justice to its nuances and understatements.

The central love affair between Laura and Alec is played simply and honestly by Naomi Frederick and Tristan Shurrock. What is left unsaid is suggested by powerful and evocative stage projections: scenes and sounds of sea, surf and an underwater swimmer suggest Laura's childhood holidays in Cornwall when she was free and completely herself! I particularly enjoyed the moment when Laura and Alec literally are swept off their feet - the actors deftly rising and dancing in the air as they sip champagne!

The clever set makes great us of the railway station; it is the setting for moments of exquisite pain as the characters face up to the impossibility of their situation - there can be no future for them together! It takes on an almost mythic quality suggesting the transience of lives, unfulfilled desires and bitter disappointments; perpetual connecting trains, are missed or caught just in time.

Kneehigh gives Coward's play and film a distinctly 21st century edge. The other lovers from the "lower orders" provide a comic and ironic counter point to the central lovers. Their comic potential is exploited fully by the versatile members of the company.

Tamzin Griffin plays a lush Myrtle, Amanda Lawrence the girlish, yet knowing Beryl. Andy Williams is brilliant as the sensible, loyal Fred and the jovial and rather naughty Albert - two sides of the same coin? And you will definitely enjoy Stuart McLoughlin as the lovable Stanley - his singing voice evoking the sadness that is never very far from the lives of all these lovers.

The central love story is one of suppressed emotion and disappointment - very stiff-upper lip stuff. The lovers' tragedy is that they just can't break away from convention and the expectations of others.

You could read it as an expression of Coward's own inability to express his feelings openly as a gay man in the 1930's. However, I prefer to see it as a classic post war film: after the emotional intensity and uncertainties of wartime Britain when people really had to live for the moment - peace required the return of certainties, a social order with everyone in their place - class and gender divisions became even more important as families and the nation rebuilt our shattered lives.

As painful as it is, Laura, mother and wife, and Alec, father, husband and doctor, have to out their lives according to the rules! Is doesn't make it any easier though!

You will enjoy this passionate and witty show. You simply can't go wrong.

Cheers, the Rep. Two brilliant productions and it's only just October.