Brief Encounter, Royal Exchange, Manchester
Oh how hesitant, oh how tentative, was falling in love back in the days before Bumble and Tinder. Oh how stiff upper-lipped, oh how buttoned-up as those cardigans. Oh Fred, what a fool I’ve been!
This production of Emma Rice’s adaptation of Brief Encounter is a glorious period piece of which Noel Coward himself would heartily approve. Though it does help to be familiar with the film version of what’s been hailed as the greatest love movie of all time to fully appreciate the slow pace, a pace that came as welcome respite from the frenetic world of Christmas markets and street music and torrential downpour outside.
It’s not really a musical version, but a play with songs, and music that’s played by the band at the side of the stage interweaving perfectly with the action and the script.
Hannah Azuonye and Baker Mukasa play Laura and Alec, the staid, married, middle aged strangers who fall in love in the tea room at a station waiting room (see what I mean about a period piece). It’s the most famous of all dramatic cliches, as he – a doctor – gets a bit of grit out of her eye.
We know little about his wife and family, but we meet her dull husband Fred (Richard Glaves) who has no romance in his soul, and is unable to respond to his wife’s attempt to reveal her infidelity. (That is, the point at which she’s been to the “pictures” with a stranger, a doctor. Wholesome profession, says Fred, and returns to his crossword.)
In a small cast of just seven, he plays multiple roles, as do all but Alec and Laura. Delightfully caricatured is Christina Modestou in the role of the tea room manager, baking her Bath buns and bossing her staff, including the hapless Beryl (Ida Regan). She stuns us all with a maturely unsettling “Mad about the boy”, while Modestou also gets the chance to give voice to the great jazzy number “I’m no good at love”.
Relieving the angst and the ache of the unfulfilled lovers is the budding romance between Regan and her cheeky-chappie suitor Matthew Allen, while Georgia Frost doubles as Stanley and Bill.
Director Sarah Frankcom worked closely with set designer Rose Revitt, who’s created a stunning station, particularly the rafters built into the dome of the Exchange, complete with a station clock. “I’ve spent a lot of time in train stations,” says Frankcom. “There’s a sense that they hold this energy of arrival and departure. They’re places of the everyday, but they’re also places where massive things can happen, where people can say goodbye for the last time, where people can meet each other…they’re like little communities.”
Revitt says she researched countless historical railway stations and was drawn to the vast and spectacular architecture of station concourses. “A trip on a steam train was a particularly fun part of the research process. I was struck by the movement, the rattle and rumble of the engine, the lights, the steam itself, and the dust particles (which themselves play a small but important role in the show).”
And that’s where the music also plays an important role in creating that atmosphere, building a show fit for trainspotters as well as romantics. It’s a great Christmas special here in Manchester.
Runs until January 13. Tickets and details: https://www.royalexchange.co.uk/whats-on/
Stagey Lady 