A Brief Encounter In Scarborough

For someone like me, whose creativity is challenged by rearranging family photographs on the mantelpiece, turning the Noel Coward/David Lean classic, Brief Encounter, into a musical seems like an Everest of a project. How do you get memories of the film out of an audience’s head?

A shift in focus is one solution and it comes as soon as the audience arrive. Before any action, characters interact with the aisle seats and the front rows: a uniformed guard punches tickets (Robert Jackson); a young girl asks if anyone has seen a cat called Mimi (Lara Lewis); the station cafe manager (Natasha Lewis), discusses cake preferences with me. So we are swiftly in the moment.

But we are not. Brief Encounter is, in many ways, a catalogue of bygone mores and it is fascinating to reflect how Laura and Alec’s chance meeting might have played out in a Starbucks.

Emma Rice’s adaptation and Paul Robinson’s direction exceed expectations and leave a sense of a familiar tale retold to fresh effect.

The first encounter between Laura (Anne-Marie Piazza) and Alec (Pete Ashmore) is a random one and they ignore each other, but the famous piece of grit in Laura’s eye intervenes. The romance is off and running.

Both characters are toned down in manner and appearance. Except when her dazzling smile lights up the auditorium, Piazza is the acme of respectability. Nothing rakish about Alec either – neither of them are, as they say, up for it. Designer Jessica Curtis dresses Laura in tightly buttoned down frocks and low heeled shoes. Alec is similarly restrained, but they do loosen up after a boating accident leaves them both soaked. A moment of comedy in the increasingly intense psychology of the plot.

The scenes representing the progress of their relationship call for erotic, sinuous movement. Both writhe in a manner that is independent, but synchronised, under lowered lighting. An effective shorthand for their thoughts, if not their actions.

Complementing the action are nine Coward songs. Some of them are familiar – Mad About the Boy; A Room with a View – while others are new to me – Any Little Fish; Go Slow Johnny – the last of these representing Alec’s injunction to himself to not alarm Laura about the direction their affair is taking.

Alex Weatherhill at the piano and Shelagh Revell on bass provide the bedrock of the evening’s music, but all cast members make contributions on various instruments. And, triple threat time, they could all sing and dance competently, although no choreographer was credited in the programme.

Typically for the Stephen Joseph, every aspect of production is slick and exact. Director Robinson clearly aims to ensure that all the business of entrances and exits do not detract from the central focus of the show: how two people react to suddenly finding themselves swept up in a relationship that is overwhelming, but looked for by neither.

As their affair comes to its inevitable conclusion, in an echo of the film, Laura sits down at the family piano and begins to play Rachmaninov's wildly romantic Second Piano Concerto. She is affirming her own identity – not just housewife, wife and mother - but her own person.

This is reinforced by the appearance on stage of the other female members of the cast dressed in identical costume to Laura – this time a little more stylish than we have seen her in before. Surely Emma Rice is telling us that here is a woman possessed of more than a single facet of personality.

Suddenly, the doors of possibility open and we are left to speculate - where next for Laura and Alec?