THIS MONTH sees a real treat for British theatre fans with the opening of Brief Encounter at the Wallis Playhouse in Beverly Hills.
Readers of a certain age will of course remember the classic David Lean film starring Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson, which launched a thousand hankies. The story centers on the doomed relationship of Laura, a suburban housewife who discovers passion and falls madly in love with Alec, a married doctor, in a railway station tearoom over a series of stolen afternoons
before Alec learns he must move to South Africa and they must part, living forever with regret.
Remembered as one of the most haunting love stories ever told, the film was based on Noel Coward’s 1936 one-act play Still Life and memorably featured in the score Sergei Rachmaninoff’s “Piano Concerto #2.”
Switching seamlessly between theater and film using a combination of the play and the film, this production from the England’s Kneehigh Theatre Company takes you back to a bygone age of romance and the silver screen. Hannah Yelland and Tristan Sturrock star as Laura and Alec and the show is adapted and directed by Emma Rice.
The original production toured the UK before opening in 2008 at the Haymarket Cinema in London’s West End, which was converted into a theatre for this production. The production ran through November 2008, followed by a 27 week UK tour. In September 2009, American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco held the United States premiere, which transferred to St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, New York, December 2009, followed by an engagement at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis in February 2010.
Kneehigh is a Cornwall-based theatre company with a local, national and international profile. For over 30 years, Kneehigh ‘has created vigorous, popular and challenging theatre and performs with the joyful anarchy that audiences have come to expect from this groundbreaking company’.
The original British stage production was hailed as “a first-class return to romance” by the Daily Telegraph and The New York Times said “Don’t be ashamed if you feel a bit like swooning.”
Brief Encounter plays February 15 – March 23. The Wallis Playhouse is located at 9390 Santa Monica Boulevard (between Crescent and Canon Drives) in Beverly Hills. For tickets, visit www.thewallis.org.
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