Top 5 Coolest Things I’ve ever seen:
#5. Noel Coward’s Brief Encounter at ACT
Essentially, it’s a staged adaptation of the movie Brief Encounter, which is in itself a film adaptation of Noel Coward’s play Still Life. It’s about a short, doomed romance between two people in a train station in 1938.
But what the visiting Kneehigh Theatre troupe has done with this story is an absolute spectacle. The show combines elements of stage and screen, with actors presented before a cinematic backdrop that sometimes they can even enter. Musicians on stage provide a charming cabaret act between the otherwise serious scenes, as well as background music that keeps this piece in a charming rhythm marching toward a strange, sad, fated end. The music and the dialogue engage in a seamless pas de deux, feeding the energy of one another and using one to explain the other.
The entire performance I found myself either agape with astonishment at what I was watching, or smiling at the realization that a piece of theatre was making me feel something so profound. For fifteen minutes after the show, I was absolutely speechless. And I’m usually the kind of person that’s hard to shut up.
I can say that I’ve seen better plays in my life than this one. I’ve seen actors that have made me feel more than these ones; storylines that have resonated deeper in me than this one.
But in terms of an all-around spectacle, there is nothing that I have seen before that comes close to matching the magnitude, grandeur, and all-around mastery of this production. This is first-rate theatre in every sense, and a true gift to us in the San Francisco bay from our friends in England.
