David Lean's 1945 movie, Brief Encounter, was based on a Noël Coward one-act play, Still Life, written a decade earlier. Now Emma Rice has conflated the two versions to come up with a multimedia show staged in a West End cinema. While the result has all the frenzied inventiveness one associates with her Kneehigh company, it also emerges as a somewhat odd hybrid.
The basic story remains: Laura, the respectable suburban wife, and Alec, the idealistic, married doctor, meet in a station buffet, fall passionately in love but are doomed never to find fulfilment. But Rice has added two other couplings, interspersed the romantic action with nine Coward ditties and deployed new film sequences either to articulate the characters' hidden emotions or to create a mood of parodic nostalgia.
It all becomes a bit much. While it is good to hear some of Coward's less familiar songs, it creates a mood more akin to music-hall skit than Still Life. Even the use of filmed inserts to show Laura's secret yearning for liberation slightly misses the point: the pathos of the film and play springs from the fact that intense inner feelings can never be fully expressed.
Yet, although the show is overloaded, Rice uses the stage with imaginative freedom. Even if Naomi Frederick and Tristan Sturrock cannot hope to compete with our movie memories of Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard, they both give thoroughly decent performances. But in this democratic version, it is the minor characters who come off best, especially Amanda Lawrence as a station-buffet menial with her own secret dreams and Tamzin Griffin as her hoity-toity, slyly suggestive boss. In the end, however, the show friskily demonstrates Kneehigh's skill but at the cost of the quiet integrity that makes the original Brief Encounter so moving.
· Until June 22. Box office: 0871 230 1562. A version of this review appeared in later editions of yesterday's paper.
