Mocking ‘Brief Encounter’ Is No Affair to Remember: John Simon
"Brief Encounter"
Joan Marcus/Boneau/Bryan-Brown via Bloomberg
Tristan Sturrock and Hannah Yelland as would-be illicit lovers in "Brief Encounter" in New York. The British production is running at Studio 54 in Manhattan.
Tristan Sturrock and Hannah Yelland as would-be illicit lovers in "Brief Encounter" in New York. The British production is running at Studio 54 in Manhattan. Photographer: Joan Marcus/Boneau/Bryan-Brown via Bloomberg
"Brief Encounter"
Joan Marcus/Boneau/Bryan-Brown via Bloomberg
Annette McLaughlin and Joseph Alessi in "Brief Encounter" in New York. The British production is running at Studio 54 in Manhattan.
Annette McLaughlin and Joseph Alessi in "Brief Encounter" in New York. The British production is running at Studio 54 in Manhattan. Photographer: Joan Marcus/Boneau/Bryan-Brown via Bloomberg
If you know Noel Coward’s lovely one-acter “Still Life” and its beautifully expanded movie adaptation, “Brief Encounter,” you might expect a similar thrill from the full-length stage version created by England’s Kneehigh Theatre and presented on Broadway by the Roundabout Theatre Company.
What Emma Rice, the adapter and director, has wrought is a mixed-media event that retains most of the original material while adding projections, Coward songs dragged in from elsewhere, and an onstage little band. The result is a hash that neither honors the original nor justifies spoofing it at such length.
Laura (Hannah Yelland) and Alec (Tristan Sturrock), both married with children, meet at a railway junction where Alec, a doctor, removes some grit from Laura’s eye.
They begin to see each other weekly, when she does the family shopping and he subs at the local hospital. They meet in the station cafe, the movies and, once, at a borrowed apartment where an attempted tryst fails humiliatingly when the owner prematurely returns.
Projections of crashing ocean waves send up their passion.
Laughing Stock
The comedy is supplied by middle-aged, moralistic cafe proprietress, Myrtle (Annettte McLaughlin), who is seeing the similarly middle-aged Albert (Joseph Alessi), the jocular ticket collector. There’s also Myrtle’s young assistant, Beryl (Dorothy Atkinson), involved with Stanley (Gabriel Ebert), who sells goodies from a portable tray.
After Alec announces that he has taken a job in Johannesburg, he steps before the curtain and sings “Room With a View,” accompanying himself inexplicably on ukulele.
Equally incongruous are Stanley and Beryl in an early extended comic chase, during which they sing “Any Little Fish.” In no more appropriate solos, Myrtle sings a much too sophisticated Coward lyric, “No Good at Love,” with music by Barker, and Beryl sings ”Mad About the Boy,” hugging Stanley’s cello.
Even these are surpassed by the ending, wherein Laura, suddenly a virtuoso, sits down at her piano and pounds out the Rachmaninoff second piano concerto, which served as background music for the movie version. Behind her, those waves are crashing, grandiose as ever.
Pity the actors caught in this bastardization, especially Yelland and Sturrock, fighting memories of Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard, unsurpassable in the movie version. Also Alessi, saddled with conspicuously doubling Albert and Fred, Laura’s husband.
And to think that this farrago received critical encomia in various venues!
Through Dec. 5 at Studio 54, 254 W. 54th St. Information: +1-212-719-1300; http://www.roundabouttheatre.org Rating: *
What the Stars Mean: **** Do Not Miss *** Excellent ** Good * Poor (No stars) Worthless
(John Simon is the New York drama critic for Muse, the arts and leisure section of Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)
To contact the writer of this column: John Simon in New York at jis1925@aol.com.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Manuela Hoelterhoff at mhoelterhoff@bloomberg.net.
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