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Monday 8 September 2008

Coward tribute

Brief Encounter
The Cinema Haymarket

The Homecoming
Almeida

Under the Eagle
White Bear

Bit of a spoiled brat, the Cinema Haymarket. Can’t decide what it wants. Originally built as a theatre, it defected to the movies for many years but having tired of hosting popcorn blockbusters it’s now receiving plays again. Lovely auditorium, though. Wide comfy seats arranged with such a steep rake that you can see perfectly even if the chap in front of you is Lennox Lewis in a top hat. This new phase of its life begins with an update of Brief Encounter. Like the venue, the show isn’t certain quite what it wants to be. The classic storyline is supplemented with heaps of visual effects, snatches of music-hall pastiche and enough Noël Coward songs to qualify as a tribute show. Pick’n’mix approach. Hit’n’miss result.

Director Emma Rice certainly sweats her actors. They dance, sing, mime, play music and occasionally dangle from ropes while pretending to be unconscious. Alec is played by Tristan Sturrock (a handsome, chiselled actor about as tall as a parking meter), who faithfully reproduces the prosaic elegance of the period. And Naomi Frederick’s Laura is stylishly demure. But neither can hope to rival Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson. I began to think of hyenas pawing at the scraps left by lions. Tamzin Griffin, perhaps wondering why she hadn’t landed the role of Laura, does a superb comic turn as the matron of the station tea-room. Her upwardly mobile cockney vowels are ridiculously elongated. ‘Cake or pastry’ comes out as ‘key ache or peer stray’. Besides the central action there are marginal characters whose romantic entanglements imitate, and demonstrate by contrast, the quiet and heroic grandeur of Alec and Laura’s affair. But these sideshow trysts get quite annoying and the production struggles to harmonise its myriad different registers.

Music, comedy, acrobatics, tragedy, romance, burlesque and straight drama are plenty, never mind the filmed inserts which are laughably banal. Crashing seas to symbolise sexual desire is as inspiring as a coffin on a Get Well Soon card. And yet somehow the lustrous and magical core of Coward’s script shines through. The final moment, when Alec says goodbye forever by touching Laura’s shoulder for a fleeting second, is as gut-tugging as the movie itself.

More articles from: Lloyd Evans | this section

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