Writer: Noël Coward
Director: Tam Williams
David Lean’s Brief Encounter is a triumph of British Cinema. The nostalgic tale of a chance meeting and clandestine affair between two married strangers at a railway station is the ultimate doomed romance. Shot in elegant black and white with lots of phallic trains thundering in and out of the station, it’s 90 glorious minutes of subtext, repression and thwarted desire. While the film is a 24-carat classic, many won’t be aware it started as a 1935 Noël Coward stage play, Still Life.
At the Theatre Royal Drury Lane Theatre, with which Coward had a long relationship, there’s a bronze statue of him here by Angela Conner. Still Life is performed in the lavish Grand Saloon Bar with its arched ceilings, green marble columns and glittering chandeliers. The cost of a ticket (£75) includes a very British high tea that includes cucumber and prawn sandwiches, macaroons and mini lemon meringues, although Parkin and Yorkshire Curd Tart would have been more in keeping with the fictional South Yorkshire station of Milford Junction.
As hissing stream trains can be heard pulling in and as station bells clang, the viewer effectively becomes another traveller or commuter as the story unfolds all around. Station master, Albert (Antony Jardine) woos Myrtle, the matriarch who runs the station café: a magnetically funny performance by Elizabeth Elvin, who channels Molly Sugden in Are You Being Served? Beryl, Myrtle’s assistant (Seren Sandham-Davies), could do with a fly swat as she’s relentlessly pursued by callow Stanley, the snack seller and a persistent suitor
While these two minor relationships are performative, entertaining and socially acceptable, the central one, all urgent whispers and agonised gazing, is not. When Laura, the cut-glass housewife, gets grit in her eye and is helped by Alec, a doctor who happens to be on the platform, the chance meeting evolves into a full-blown affair over a year. The passing of time is marked only by the growing familiarity with which orders are taken at the counter: “The usual?” Still Life is written with such urgency of feeling, such truth in the practicalities of concealment, that there’s been much speculation it was inspired by an actual experience of Noël Coward, who lived secretly as a queer man before it was acceptable or legal
The two leads, co-founders of Wild Pursuit Theatre, originally performed this production at the Waterwheel Bar at Oxfordshire’s Mill on Sonning, where producer Sally Hughes is Artistic Director. Rachel Pickup as Laura communicates the moral agony, pain of her growing feelings and impossibility of the situation. She conveys 1940s elegance and restraint, perfectly costumed, bar the anachronistic 1970s macrame handbag. Alec, played by Alasdair Craig as the doctor, is pushy, insistent and slightly overbearing. In today’s language, he might even be called coercive, although that wasn’t a thing in 1935. He conveys something deeper, darker, even vaguely sinister, quite unlike gentle Trevor Howard in the film. What is it with this tea room? Is there a special ingredient in the Bath Buns that has turned it into such a place of pent-up passion?
Practically, the acoustics are sometimes swallowed up in the scale of the venue. The intensity and intimacy of close-up shots you get in film are lost in the grandeur of this 86-foot Regency state room. Depending on where you’re positioned, you might need to crane your neck to voyeuristically observe the affair. Nonetheless, this isn’t your average theatre experience, but something quite special: a chance to step into the majestic Theatre Royal Drury Lane Theatre and watch/experience the blueprint for Brief Encounter, one of the greatest films ever made.
With live music, singing and fresh cream scones, what’s not to like? Although no station restaurants in Yorkshire are quite so magnificent, this is an inauthentic luxury you can live with for an hour of beautifully written, elegantly rendered theatre with a production that has the potential to travel the UK.
Runs until 12 September 2026
