I have rarely seen a show as imaginative as Emma Rice's adaptation and direction of Noel Coward's Brief Encounter, now on Broadway. (The 39 Steps comes closest.) It's a zany concoction extrapolated from the original play and movie about a basically doomed clandestine affair between two middle-aged married people, beautifully played by Tristan Sturrock and Hannah Yelland. With a terrific British ensemble cast including the strong, exaggerated (but believable) Dorothy Atkinson, Annette McLaughlin and Joseph Alessi, Rice gives us, in addition to the outer story, filmed sequences of the inner emotional dreams of the characters, songs of the time by Coward and Stu Barker (the musicians are actors, the actors musicians), action, music, dance, laughs, and true emotional engagement as the end of the affair arrives. With the flexible set by Neil Murray serving both serious background and stage for comedy (he also designed the costumes - straight ahead for the principals, just over the top for the comedy), with superb lighting by Malcolm Rippeth, Brief Encounter is a brilliant theatrical adventure - a rare piece of contemporary Commedia.
