Be transported back with this rendition of the classic film, in Bolton next month.
When theatre maker Emma Rice added 10 of Noel Coward’s songs to the script he had written for the classic 1945 movie romance, she magically transformed it into an operatic homage, complete with some startling digital projection tricks of its own.
As an end-stage production it became a cinematic wide-screen performance, with a quite breath-taking moment of theatre when the Dover boat train appeared to hurtle through the auditorium.
Now, in this joint production between venues in Keswick, Bolton and Scarborough, designed for their in-the-round stages, it becomes a more scaled-back, three-dimensional account, lacking digital trickery perhaps, but losing nothing of the authentic power of the original story of unrequited passion.
Indeed it comes up with one or two of its own stage effects and some effective moments of slow-motion movement.
When a doctor in a railway waiting room encounters a stranger needing a speck of grit removing from her eye it begins a middle-class, middle-age affair doomed by social conventions. Coward’s cabaret-style songs, stylishly threaded into the story, underscore the star-crossed lovers plight, besides occasionally shifting the spotlight on to the railway romances going on elsewhere around the setting.
As the central characters, Pete Ashmore and Anne-Marie Piazza are note-perfect, their clipped delivery avoiding pastiche. They achieve a heart-rending chemistry when the rest of the cast serenade them to the strains of Go Slow Johnny at the close of the first act.
All seven performers are multi-instrumentalists and augment the piano and double bass of Alex Weatherhill and Maximillian Douglas Lamprecht. Musical matters of the heart come to a head in a show-stopping ‘brass duel’ between Robert Jackson and Natasha Lewis as the station master and buffet manageress.
Elsewhere Coward’s furtively homo-erotic lyrics of Mad About The Boy are turned neatly on their head, while Room With a View becomes a slow-burning lament of lost love. The final curtain play-out of Rachmaninov’s second piano concerto is a moving contrivance . . . unless that’s just grit in your eye?
Brief Encounter will always be a steam-driven story from another age, but one with an enduring power.
The play runs from October 20 to November 5 in Bolton at the Octagon Theatre. Book tickets at octagonbolton.co.uk
