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by Noel Coward, directed by Jackie Maxwell

Shaw Festival, Festival Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake

May 20-October 24, 2009

“Delectatio Interrupta"

“Brief Encounters” is the first instalment of the Shaw Festival’s production of Noel Coward’s cycle of ten one-act plays from 1935-36 known as “Tonight at 8:30”.  Once al the instalments have opened this will the first time in history that all ten will have been performed together in repertory.  “Brief Encounters” is the Festival’s title for its collection of three plays--“Still Life”, “We Were Dancing” and “Hands Across the Sea”.  While the cast and design are excellent, director Jackie Maxwell has made some odd choices that make this a less than satisfying evening.

First up is “Still Life” (1936), perhaps the most famous of the ten and made into one of the classic of British film by David Lean under the title “Brief Encounter” (1945).  The Shaw previously staged the play as a lunch-time show in 2000, and it must be admitted that that production was far more effective than the present one.  Set in the lunch room of the train station at Milford Junction, the play shows us the first meeting, falling in love and inevitable parting of Dr. Alec Harvey (Patrick Galligan) and Laura Jesson (Deborah Hay), both already married with children.  Two other couples provide a comic counterpoint to this tragic romance--the conductor Albert Godby (Thom Marriott) flirts with Myrtle Bagot (Corrine Koslo), who runs the lunch room, and the refreshment seller Stanley (Gray Powell) flirts with Beryl Waters (Krista Colosimo), the waitress.              

Designer William Schmuck creates quite a realistic run-down public room on stage with a central revolving door and a large clock with revolving hands suggesting the pressure of time and change upon all the characters.  Adam Larsen’s exceptional projections vividly create the effect of lighted passenger trains arriving and departing just past the lunch room’s frosted windows.  He also underscores the passage of time by showing the shadows of the girders of the station’s roof moving over the set between scenes as the sun shifts in the sky.

Galligan and Hay are excellent as the central couple--he filled with a sense of hope against hope, she with a growing sense of doom--as their relationship progresses.  Marriott gives a fine portrait of a happy-go-lucky character and Powell is clearly a younger version of Albert but with more restraints because of his lower position.  Koslo’s Myrtle, however, is so standoffish toward Albert that it’s a wonder he persists.  There is little of the rapport Neil Barclay and Nora McLellan displayed in 2000 and, with it, not enough of the full extent of Myrtle’s hypocrisy.  Maxwell presents Beryl as merely a dull serving girl and seeks comedy from it, whereas in the earlier version director Dennis Garnhum heightened the poignant atmosphere by showing that Beryl’s inattention was due to her worry about her mother’s declining health.

The greatest sin Maxwell commits is not allowing us to savour the play’s ending.  The set flies apart and the piece of the set where the isolated Laura is sitting glides slowly backwards into the dark, a fine depiction the collapse of her world.  If only Maxwell had placed an intermission here to allow us to deal with the ambiguous feelings the play arouses.  But no, she plunges us without a break directly into the  farcical world of “We Were Dancing” (1935) when we’re not in the mood.  The giddy world of the play set in the fictitious British island colony of Samolo, a kind of Singapore with a view of Sumatra on a clear day, seems even sillier and jars after the distressing ending of “Still Life”. 

There is a link between the two plays.  Here Louise Charteris (Deborah Hay), a married woman, enjoys a magical dance with Karl Sandys (Patrick Galligan), after which both suddenly realize they’re in love.  Unlike the furtive lovers of “Still Life”, these two immediate blurt out their new-found romance to Louise’s husband Hubert (Thom Marriott) and his sister Clara (Goldie Semple) and demand it be recognized and acted upon.  The comedy derives from the disparate ways Hubert and Clara react--he with increasing calm and rationality, she with increasing outrage directed first at the couple and then at her milquetoast of a brother.  Maxwell states in her programme note that Coward’s one-acters were written to showcase his and Gertrude Lawrence’s talents.  Galligan and Hay, who play their parts, do amaze us in making the 180 degree turn from tragedy to comedy in so short a time.  Nevertheless, this may be farce but it is still Coward, a point Maxwell seems to forget by encouraging wild gestures and absurd poses.    

When Karl tries to explain how he and Louise fell in love he breaks into the title song “We Were Dancing”.  This and the accompaniment are pre-recorded so that, disconcertingly, Galligan and eventually the entire cast are lipsynching to the music.  Not only that, but Maxwell has decided to stage the song as the Balinese equivalent of a Bollywood dance number.  This would be fun enough in isolation, but it really comes out of nowhere and, to top everything off, ends the first half of the evening with an intermission in the middle of the play!

This is a mistake for many reasons, the worst being that it destroys the pacing of “We Were Dancing” which is central to its humour.  The lovers note that “the moment” has passed, which Maxwell has made much too long with the interposed interval.  Again the set flies apart and relocates us in an upper-class drawing room in London for the final play “Hands Across the Sea” (1935).  Designer William Schmuck has provided furniture and an entry hall, but otherwise the wall-less “apartment” is entirely exposed to Larsen’s projection of a gloomy London skyline. 

The link between these plays is that Lady Maureen Gilpin (Deborah Hay), aptly nicknamed “Piggie”, has invited a couple who were kind to her in Malaya to visit her in London, but she has forgotten all about it.  When a Mr. and Mrs. Wadhurst (Thom Marriott and Corrine Koslo) arrive, she assumes they are the same people.  The play is a cutting satire of the pettiness and self-centredness of the upper classes since as more and more of Piggie’s friends arrive, the more this in-group ignores the the patiently sitting and politely smiling Wadhursts.  Maxwell tries to force a deeper meaning onto the comedy by having barrage balloons appear in the sky accompanying the arrival of each guest.  She seems to be saying that just as Piggie’s guests ignore the Wadhursts so they were wilfully ignorant of the coming signs of World War II.  This effort fails because few people will know that what look like quilted blimps are actually barrage balloons, and even those who do know will wonder why they appear in a play that premiered in 1935 when the RAF Balloon Command was not formed until 1938.  More importantly, how exactly are the meek Wadhursts in any equivalent to a Nazi threat?

Of the three plays, this is the least effective probably because it needs to be staged in a smaller space.  It is a situation where nothing that the characters say is important.  Rather is it the multiple glances to and fro as to “Who are these people?” and “What should I do about it?” that are funny but don’t come across in a large theatre. 

Goldie Semple, who is condemned to play obnoxious women in all three plays, is especially good in this last as the drunken, cynical and gossippy Clare Wedderburn, the epitome of a class turned completely in upon itself.  Hay is very funny as Piggie, particularly when she tries via a kind of jig to shake out of her disorganized brain the names of her guests.  As the military men Patrick Galligan, as Piggie’s husband Peter, Gray Powell as Major Gosling and David Schurmann as Lieutenant Commander Corbett are all practically interchangeable.  Maxwell tries to derive comedy from the Wadhurst’s placidity and eventual drunkenness, but increasing signs of discomfort might seem more logical and funnier.  She should also to try to integrate Wade Bogert-O’Brien playing Mr. Burnham but mistaken as the Wadhursts‘ son more into the action.

The effect of the evening is that of listening to a great symphony live only to enter a restaurant where pop music is blaring.  The unsettledness caused by the lack of an intermission where it should be and the placing of one where it shouldn’t never resolves itself.  It’s adds up to a case of pleasure interrupted. 

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Patrick Galligan and Deborah Hay in Still Life. ©David Cooper.