At New Vic Theatre, Newcastle-under-Lyme, until Saturday 10 September
My only cavil at Brief Encounter, playing at the New Vic for four nights, is that the run is too brief. The rest is all superlatives.
From the original play by Noel Coward via the 1946 film by David Lean to the musical stage adaptation by Emma Rice and now this version of it in the round directed by Paul Robinson, the story becomes more engaging with every new incarnation.
Housewife Laura and GP Alec – both respectable, married, with children – meet by chance in a train station canteen. With a few slow-motion gestures of connection, something unusual and unexpected is sown between them and over a series of brief encounters they fall in love.
With minimal conversation, mostly in a public space, this is achieved utterly convincingly by lead actors Anne-Marie Piazza and Pete Ashmore. It’s sheer delight to witness. But our enchantment is tempered, like theirs, by the knowledge that the course of this love cannot carry us away like the express trains that periodically whoosh by in a cloud of smoke making the crockery rattle.
“Do you feel guilty? Laura asks Alec. “As if we’re letting something happen that we shouldn’t?” And when it is almost too late, “We are neither of us free to love each other.” The moral challenge they face is as ordinary today as has ever been, but it is played out exquisitely. Short scenes – over lunch in a hotel restaurant, at a cinema matinee, in a hired row boat – stretch ever closer to breaking point.
The tension that envelops the fledgling relationship of Laura and Alec is counterbalanced by two other relationships. Ticket Inspector Albert flirts cheekily with canteen manager Myrtle, their cheerful dalliance providing much physical humour – never more so than when Albert demonstrates his unbridled passion on a saxophone and Myrtle whips out a trombone to get back at him.
The attraction between young waitress Beryl and snack-seller Stanley is even more innocent. After GP Alec has sensitively removed a painful grit from Laura’s eye, Stanley is asked if he’s got something in his eye and answers, “Only a twinkle every once in a while.”
Coward’s songs enrich the drama throughout. The opening number, ‘Any Little Fish’, is danced with unalloyed joy. ‘Mad About the Boy’, sung by the ensemble as Laura plays it on her gramophone at home, is heart rending. ‘A Room with a View’ almost devastating. But like the story itself, thankfully, only ‘almost’.