Brief Encounter
Adapted by Emma Rice
Broadway's Studio 54
There's so much inventiveness in this import from Britain's Kneehigh Theatre that I feel like a grump having to report that the show itself is something of a disappointment. Based on the 1945 Noel Coward-David Lean film about a pair of middle-class Brits who meet in a train station and have a tentative, never-quite consummated love affair, it's the latest in a small but piquant new genre of screen-to-stage transcriptions: not conventional adaptations, but attempts to reproduce the film almost literally onstage — tongue firmly in cheek at the sheer cheekiness of the enterprise. The prototype was The 39 Steps, a clever reprise of Hitchcock's suspense thriller with just four performers doing all the parts. But that spoofy take was perfectly appropriate for a film that was something of a spoof to begin with. Brief Encounter, for all its dated, stuff-upper-lip stodginess, is a dead serious, and quite moving, story of a doomed love affair. It's fun to watch the potpourri of stage gimmicks (characters slip in and out of a movie screen, are hoisted above the stage on chandeliers, and get serenaded by a onstage band doing old Noel Coward numbers). But what's missing is the movie's emotional core — the impassioned delicacy of its portrayal of two people who glimpse all too briefly the romance that their ordinary lives can never permit.