Playwright Noel Coward, the flamboyant wit of the twentieth-century British stage, was known in his time for his theatrical and charming plays — and he still is. But Brief Encounter, which he adapted from his 1925 one-act play Still Life into the beloved 1945 film starring Celia Johnson, is a stirring wartime romance of unfulfilled love. It is the consummate British story of emotions expressed — and then repressed. But you wouldn’t know that from watching director Emma Rice’s boisterous and flashy adaptation of Brief Encounter for the stage, which recently opened in New York City on Broadway at the Roundabout Theatre, and runs until December 5, 2010.
The main action of the play takes place in a train station tearoom, where Laura, an earnest upper-middle class housewife, and Alec, a married general practitioner, first meet. In their brief encounter on that otherwise ordinary Thursday afternoon, the heroic and charming doctor removes a piece of train grit from Laura’s watering eye as the tearoom staff, the play’s jocular and engaging supporting cast, look on in incongruous horror and fear, almost as if Alec is performing open-heart surgery right on the spot. After Alec takes the grit out of Laura’s eye, he hands it off to one member of the tearoom staff, who with a gasp, passes it to another, and then another, and another. Finally, it reaches the last person, who with cutesy innocence sticks it in her mouth as the audience roars in amusement and disgust.
What begins as an innocent friendship between Laura and Alec develops, over Thursday lunches at the tearoom, into an impossible love — a love that was cheapened in Rice’s production by froth and artifice. The couple’s slapstick boat ride, which was presumably meant to appear romantic, fell short, and the whimsical dance routine, which had the couple swinging from chandeliers and dancing on chairs, with the tearoom workers looking on enchanted, was unaccountably fanciful. On the other hand, that the members of the tearoom staff are spectators to the couple’s affair can at times heighten its moral ambiguity: Laura and Alec, in their extramarital bliss, are constantly being watched, after all, but watched by a set of merry wags.
The play’s lighthearted gaiety, dazzling as it is, deflates Coward’s ultimate melancholy, expressed beautifully in the following exchange between Alec and Laura, which Rice opens the play with, preparing the audience for the drama that ensues.
Alec: I love you. I love your wide eyes, the way you smile, your shyness, and the way you laugh at my jokes.
Laura: Please don’t.
Alec: I love you. I love you. You love me too. It’s no use pretending it hasn’t happened ’cause it has.
Laura: Yes it has. I don’t want to pretend anything either to you or to anyone else. But from now on, I shall have to. That’s what’s wrong. Don’t you see? That’s what spoils everything. That’s why we must stop, here and now, talking like this. We’re neither of us free to love each other. There’s too much in the way. There’s still time, if we control ourselves and behave like sensible human beings. There’s still time.
Tristan Sturrock, who plays Alec, is all lively enthusiasm, while actress Hanna Yelland, who majestically captures Laura, is the embodiment of a restraint liable to unravel at any moment.
By play’s end, the two lovers must make a choice. Alec’s brother has opened a hospital in Johannesburg, South Africa, with a position available for Alec. Laura stiffly holds herself together as she tells Alec to take it — which, after some hesitation, he does. And so Laura and Alec’s wave of stolen joy crashes into reality: their ordinary lives, with their families in tow, must go on. After all, Laura’s two children — which bizarrely appear in the play as two puppets — are waiting at home for her, as is her husband (actor Joseph Alessi), who often appears more concerned with his newspaper’s crossword puzzle than with his wife. And Alec’s two children, as absent from his mind as they were from the play, are somewhere waiting for their father too.
Alec and Laura meet for one last time at the tearoom, as Alec waits for his train to take him away forever. But the couple is robbed of their final goodbye. Laura’s neighborhood friend, a gossip, barges into the tearoom, and seats herself between Laura and Alec. Her ceaseless chatter gobbles up what should have been a heartbreaking end to their affair. Alec and Laura try to surreptitiously steal a few glances from each other, but the wailing whistle of the train interrupts them as it approaches the platform. Alec bids farewell to the gossip first, then he turns to Laura. His parting affection for Laura must be subdued to a squeeze of her shoulder as he tells her goodbye as well. His emotional restraint is visceral.
Though the couple’s parting scene is undoubtedly moving — thanks to what is left unsaid and left undone — the most gut-wrenching scene of all is reserved for play’s end, a scene that holds in it a small revelation. Laura heads home to her dull husband who — despite his flaws — turns out to be the most compassionate character on the stage. In the closing scene, he betrays the aloofness that characterized him in earlier scenes of the play.
He tells Laura, “You’ve been a long way away.”
“Yes,” she says with a quiver.
“Thank you for coming back to me.”
Rice’s adaptation, studded with ironic flourishes, is visually stunning, but not quite the right match for a story that ends on Coward’s note of responsibility. Brief Encounter is a sober story of adulthood, in which passing pleasures ultimately give way to duty. Yet Rice has managed to translate Coward’s down beat into ninety minutes of frivolity — even raunchy frivolity, as in one foxy dance scene. And this ultimately overwhelms the original spirit of the play. Rather than leaving the theater dispirited, the smiling audience leaves feeling inspired. The evening was one to remember, no doubt, but perhaps only superficially.
Emily Esfahani Smith, the managing editor of the Hoover Institution journal Defining Ideas, is an editor at the blog Ricochet.com and a senior editor at Smith and Kraus, the largest publisher of trade theater books in the USA.