SIR RICHARD BRANSON reaches for the skies - Mayfair Times

ALBERT (ANDY
WILLIAMS) AND
MYRTLE (TAMZIN
GRIFFIN)
PHOTO: ALISTAIR MUIR
Noel Coward’s classic love story Brief Encounter has been a play, a film and a musical. Now, in
its latest reincarnation, it’s all three.
Experimental theatre company Kneehigh has commandeered The Cinema Haymarket, where
the David Lean film starring Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard premiered in 1945, and returned it
– and the tale of tortured lovers – back to its theatrical origins.
Their production is an amalgamation of Coward’s original playscript (entitled Still Life), his later
film script, and numerous, rather bawdy musical ditties he penned over the years. Performed
variety-style against a crushed velvet curtain, the latter provide a nod to the cinema’s past as the
Carlton theatre, in whose ornate upper circle the cinema’s auditorium now sits.
In a brilliant blurring of stage and screen, the audience –
guided to their seats by actors dressed as 1940s-style cinema
usherettes – witnesses the show’s heroine walk into film, as she
slips behind a giant black-and-white video projection.
This piece of visual trickery sets the tone for a genre-defying
production which combines theatre, film, live music, dance and
even puppetry to tell the story of a lonely housewife tempted to
cheat on her husband with a man she meets at a railway station.
“I’m trying to bridge the gap between film and theatre,”
explains Emma Rice, the company’s artistic director.
From stage
to screen and
back again
NOEL COWARD’S CLASSIC LOVE
STORY IS GOING BACK TO ITS
ROOTS IN A PRODUCTION THAT
COMBINES FILM, THEATRE AND
MUSICAL. NUALA CALVI REPORTS
17
theatre