MikePadgett.com

Most people remember John Savident as Coronation Street’s recently deceased butcher Fred Elliott.

Fred was a self-made man, a local personality, a mainstay at the Rotary Club. A character on the cusp of extinction in today’s Britain: part of the local Con club scene, part of the furniture along with the photos of once successful football teams and dusty plaques commemorating long forgotten charity events. Fade to brown.

Happily, unlike his character, the actor is still with us and though there are similarities between the affable meatman and the grumpy old cobbler, it was the welcome return of Savident as arch-thesp that made this production of Hobson’s Choice a prospect to relish.

Indeed other people - myself included - remember the actor as a scene-stealer extraordinaire in Remains of the Day and a fistful of other period dramas.

So John Savident was right here, treading the boards at the Sheffield Lyceum as Henry Horatio Hobson, widower, cobbler, father of three aspiring daughters.

Those who remember David Lean’s 1954 film adaptation may recall that Charles Laughton didn’t really play Hobson for laughs, but the stage script was rendered duly hilarious as soon as the starting gun cracked.

Savident’s Hobson rightly dominated the play despite appearing in relatively few scenes, with the unlikely pairing of assistant bootmaker Willy Mossop (an excellent Dylan Charles) and eldest Hobson sister Maggie (Carolyn Backhouse) gelling particularly well. The wedding night scene was beautifully and affectionately played.

Indeed, the performances were all superb, as The Stage pointed out, this was “a cast which never gives less than best” [1].

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.