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Clearly not one to sulk into her P45, Emma Rice has opted to fill the time between her controversial departure from the Globe and the launch of her new company by bringing back one of her most beloved Kneehigh hits.
And we should be happy that she did. Her vivid, dreamy, emotionally charged take on Noël Coward’s greatest achievement, ‘Brief Encounter’, played an acclaimed West End season upstairs at the Empire Haymarket back in 2008. Now it’s back under the auspices of the Old Vic, in a co-production with Kneehigh.
David Lean’s 1945 film was an exquisite study in agonised longing in which a chance railway café encounter between strangers Laura and Alec (both married with kids to other people) led to them being consumed by guilt-streaked love.
It’s a platonic ideal of an affair – their love is pure, virtuous – and possibly actually platonic, the film being a byword for a sort of extreme middle class stiff-upper-lippedness that sees its protagonists experience all the guilt of infidelity and none of the good stuff.
It's unworldly, maybe, but few directors alive are as clued in to the lexicon of love as Rice, and she knows exactly what to do with Coward’s classic. Her Laura (Isabel Pollen) and Alec (Jim Sturgeon) are played dead straight. But the world around them is filled with colour and life and music, and is often cartoonishly funny – Beverley Rudd is a scene stealer in a trio of lively roles – in a way that’s unashamedly totally out of whack with the film.
And yet the raucous humour works perfectly. It stops the play seeming emotionally naive, but also elevates Laura and Alec’s love. They are in a world of colour and life, they have children and families who they love, but they are sundered, separate, unable to enjoy anything. Pollen, in the larger role, does an extraordinary line in misery, her face a world of distraught feelings as she sits alone at tables.
And the staging – the venue, the projections – is itself a celebration of the fact that this is a bygone era.
The decade since Rice first staged ‘Brief Encounter’ hasn’t diminished something that was already a strange mix of the dated and the timeless. It is about love: pure love, not lust. But it’s also about something more complicated and rarely articulated: the romance of guilt, the purity of shame and the swooning sweep of self-doubt.