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Making a song and dance about it

— A bizarrely comedic take on this weepy monochrome classic.”

Brief Encounter, The West Yorkshire Playhouse

Noël Coward’s play Still Life (1936) formed the basis of the wonderfully restrained (or rather dry, depending on your sympathies) 1945 film Brief Encounter.

The film tells the story of Laura Jesson, a terribly middle-class, well-to-do sort of housewife who takes the train at Milford Junction to do a few chores. One day she meets the urbane, well-to-do sort of doctor, Alec Harvey. An impossible affair flourishes and dies in the anonymous privacy of the station café.

Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard as housewife and doctor were delightfully repressed in the film, their furtive affair played out more in silences than in spoken words. And if we’re more used to seeing stage remade for screen, as an example of the opposite Brief Encounter seems a tough proposition.

But here the Kneehigh Theatre has done everything opposite.

As if a reaction to the monochrome movie, the play is full of colour, music and – shock horror – comedy. The stiff upper lip has curled into a knowing smirk. At times, the denizens of the cafe come perilously close to vaudevillian caricature, but the blossoming romance at the centre is wisely protected, retaining its naïveté.

The principal criticism must be that this stage Brief Encounter is rather uneven. When the wider focus of the first half – on character sketches in the station cafe – narrows significantly in the second, the play loses much of its rhythm and energy despite occasional recorse to scenes of light relief.

Nevertheless, the transformation from film to stage is successful. Even then the play does not entirely reject the overtures of cinema. Indeed, aspects of film are celebrated with film sequences projected directly onto the action and the action is choreographed in extraordinary detail.