An affair to remember

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This article was published 06/01/2011 (5694 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Brief Encounter, a Second World War-era movie about a clandestine love affair played out in a train-station tea room, was recently voted by the British as the best romantic film.

 The 1945 Noël Coward-penned weeper harkens back to a dutiful, black-and-white world for the postwar generation and unspools a nostalgia for an era when trapped, married upper-crusters like Laura and Alec contemplated adultery but chose to endure the pain of lost love with a stiff upper lip.

Younger cynical souls of today might yawn at the dated ‘no sex, we’re British’ attitude and find the slow, puritanical take on love rather quaint and simplistic. That’s how 32-year-old filmmaker Deco Dawson remembered Brief Encounter.

“I had originally seen the film version years ago and, interestingly enough, it had no emotional impact on me whatsoever,” says Dawson. “I found the film rather dull and conservative. There was no vitality.”

So he was dubious of an offer to serve as video designer on a Manitoba Theatre Centre/Vancouver Playhouse co-production of a new Brief Encounter stage adaptation by the U.K.’s Kneehigh Theatre Company, a Cornwall-based troupe renowned for its frenzied inventiveness.

But after Dawson attended a performance in Minneapolis last spring, he couldn’t agree fast enough to be part of the artistic team.

“I was so moved by the story,” he recalls. “I knew it was going to be a lot of work but I was so compelled by the production.”

Meanwhile, it played New York City twice to unusually rapturous reviews — the most recent production at Studio 54 closed last Sunday. A Canadian version continues its première run tonight at MTC starring Mairi Babb and Eric Blais. This adaptation by Emma Rice, Kneehigh’s artistic director, surrounds the central romance with humour and theatrical magic.

Rice has combined David Lean’s adored movie version with additional songs and material from Coward’s earlier one-act stage play, Still Life (1936). What’s more, she has made it visually arresting, with unexpected aerials, trains appearing seemingly out of nowhere, while characters melt from the stage into black-and-white film clips.

“Kneehigh has done a great job in creating a show that pays homage to both the Coward original and the Lean adaptation,” says Dawson, who created the video backdrop for Rick, The Rick Hansen Story, which the Manitoba Theatre for Young People presented at the Cultural Olympiad in Vancouver last year.

“This show did require a great deal of my film background to pull it off. There were a couple of greenscreen shoots with the actors, some miniature work and lots of Photoshop manipulation required to create the backgrounds.”

That Vancouver and Winnipeg are getting to see Brief Encounter is serendipitous. MTC’s artistic director Steven Schipper spotted Brief Encounter in London on one of his scouting trips to England and enlisted the Playhouse as a partner in the $1-million project. Timing is everything in the theatre, and Playhouse artistic director Max Reimer inquired about the rights just as Kneehigh and the Coward estate were wondering if the technologically challenging play could be performed by any other theatre. They opted to allow the Canadian theatres, which the Coward estate was aware of from past productions, to be their guinea pigs.

“The combination of our interest and our histories was enough for them to send us a script,” says Reimer, 56, who is helming his first MTC show. “That was before they hatched the New York deal. That’s how anxious they were to get this going.

“There was no way the Playhouse or MTC would get a smell at a work like Brief Encounter if it was running on Broadway. They would likely have had to wait about five years to secure the production rights.”

Reimer acknowledges there have been questions about the relevance of the chaste Brief Encounter in this highly sexualized, wham-bam, thank-you-ma’am era, when monogamy is a continuing challenge. He says that most people still wrestle with their consciences about breaking their marriage vows.

“The lives of Laura and Alec would be destroyed if they would follow through on their affair and it became public,” says Reimer, a former actor who appeared in MTC’s productions of Grease and The Boyfriend in the early SSRq80s. “Not like today. I think that is great cause for reflection. It’s fun to watch new generations have a view of old-school morality.”

kevin.prokosh@freepress.mb.ca