Tuesday February 19, 2008
All-too-brief encounter
Being of a romantic but cantankerous disposition, I always find Valentine’s Day a bit tricky. Obviously I want to pull out the stops. But I do not want to (1) sit in a posh restaurant amid rows of identical cooing couples, (2) cook, because it will take all night, or worst of all (3) be left alone in a situation where I am forced to present my loved one with champagne, chocolates, roses, greetings cards, or any of the other predictable paraphernalia that turn Valentine’s Day into just another excuse to rush to the bloody shops.
Then the other half came up with a rather good idea. She spotted a preview of the stage version of Brief Encounter, at the Cinema Haymarket. Apparently, she said, these entrepreneurial acting folk have converted the cinema into a 1930s-style theatre, with 1930s-style entertainments – which is doubly cool because of course not only was The Cinema Haymarket once a theatre, but Brief Encounter was once a stage play. So if even it’s rubbish, I thought, it will have a certain authenticity.
I was wrong in both predictions. First, it had very little authenticity. Second, it was brilliant. Five-star brilliant.
There are two parallel shows going on in this Brief Encounter. There is the central plot that everybody knows, in which sensible Laura and romantic Alec meet at a railway station and discover more than they wanted to know about themselves and adultery in the modern world; early on, Laura walks directly through a gap in the screen to appear on a giant projection behind the stage, and at that moment a surge of excitement moves through you, because it’s a riff on the overpowering surreality of love – the way it’s all-too-real and not-real at all, and makes ordinary life pale by comparison. And it works.
But there’s also another story, which is that if you go to a theatre in the 21st century you can still be entertained by a bunch of 1930s-style, big-eared, kooky guitar-strumming usherettes and bit-part players waving balloons and mucking about with the form, and that this is more fun for us jolly postmodern literati than it probably ever was in the 30s.
If you have a fickle heart like mine, and you can switch from teary-eyed drama to rollicking visual jokes at the flick of a directorial switch, you will love this Brief Encounter. I did laugh and I did cry. The Guardian, weirdly, only gave it three stars, on the basis that it doesn’t capture the “quiet integrity” of the original. Actually it does, but only in flashes, and then it sets those moments apart by wheeling on the mechanicals as counterpoint. If you go along, look out for the transforming songs by the surly barmaid behind the counter. “That’s bloody genius,” I found myself saying aloud, to my other half. And she was smiling too. It was that good.
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