Brief Encounter

It's not everyday that someone airlifts an entire West End production into San Francisco.  But there it is, in the Geary Theatre, with the cast still dusting off their UK passports, 'Brief Encounter.'  And I would never have seen the thing, Noël Coward striking me as more of a wit than an artist, except that the San Francisco Chronicle theater critic was ecstatic at the production.  And I didn't want to miss anything.  And I'm retired.  So having secured tickets in a befuddlement of grief and transit confusion, what the hell.  There I was with my friend Phila staring down at the Geary stage and not terribly happy with my dress circle vantage point...and watching this strange and utterly inexplicable thing come together.

According to the program notes, Coward's original piece was indeed brief.  A very short one-act became a wartime film.  Which I have never seen and don't particularly want to.  

Middle-class Brits meet in a railway station.  They meet again and have tea.  They meet elsewhere for chaste moments in a cinema and a park.  They meet some more and things get un-chaste.  And fearing that they will be outed, the lovers say goodbye.  Set in 1938, it's all happening on the brink of war, in an era of stifling social convention.  And if the story sounds at once timeless and dated, and you find yourself politely suppressing a yawn, well that's understandable.  The Cornish director of the production at the Geary understands this completely.

By the end of the two hours you have been invited to examine every creak in the creaky story.  Which was once a period film...and begins as a period film, with scratchy footage displaying the British Film Censor's classic mark in a grainy print complete with scratches...taking us into a scene deep within the story in which a husband laments his wife's remoteness...and an audience member at the Geary stands, says something to the woman beside him and she flees up the aisle and he mounts the stage and steps right through the film screen.  In seconds he is in the film's story, which is now on the stage, and so is she...the two of them meeting for the first time in a railway station.  The station café with its poseur of a proprietress, a waddling charwoman, the railway platform guard and assorted others, provide comic relief in moments, an uncomic chorus at others.

At one instant we are laughing at the café matron with her rockhard Banbury cakes.  At the next moment, as feeling between the soon-to-become lovers mounts downstage, grainy British waves crash in black-and-white period footage upstage.  And somewhere in between, the café proprietor and station crew make deliberately stiff, long-armed bows in rhythmic obeisance to the waves...and if they are mildly mocking the proceedings or waving in the romantic current, we cannot tell.  Nor do we know what is happening with the next romantic crescendo, as the man and woman are fumbling their 1938 way toward a kiss and the café crowd humms a Rachmaninoff piano concerto.  Or, later, beyond the kissing stage of the romance, when the waves crash, they also throw up black and white stars, while the café matron matter-of-factly plucks shiny golden stars from a tea tray and throws them over the lovers' heads.

Romantic.  Schmaltzy.  Late 30s restrained.  With all these tones acknowledged in a way that could be mocking or amplifying, the story continues.  It's love.  It's frustrated.  It's doomed.  It's beautiful and sad.  While life around it, and reactions to it, carry on as they will.  And the lovers do not care.  And we care about the lovers, or maybe we don't.  But emerging from all this...we care about their love.

When the catwalk descends once again from the fly...sometimes serving as an upstairs at the woman's home, at others as a bandstand and now...a place from which the heroine seems to be lowering herself into the darkness....  Which suddenly isn't darkness, for a stage-wide projected passenger train is crossing.  And will she throw herself off the railway bridge?  No.  After all, we have met her children.  Human-sized puppets dressed in pajamas.  They jar us backwards from any sentimentality concerning kids.  We stare at them, puzzled by the adult actor's voices.  No, there is more life to come.  The officious platform guard reveals himself not only announcing his train, but guiding it across the stage, a big wooden model choo-choo, lights blazing.  And soon it's only the film screen with the Rank Organization or British Pathé or some sort of period version of The End.

And even now it's not quite over.  For no one can say what sort of exhilaration sends the Geary crowd to its feet.  Or precisely why the audience is being applauded by the cast.  Things are being turned at an angle for better viewing.  And beyond historical period and mannerisms and lost ideas of what is profound and clichéd notions of the romantic...there is what?  The antic human imagination and capacity for invention.  And at the core, eternal love and loss.