"Still Life". Pilch

Noël Coward is famously summed up by the title of Sheridan Morley’s biography, ‘A Talent to Amuse’. But as the years go by, his talent seems to grow deeper and more significant. He didn’t just amuse. He explored the boundaries of theatre while remaining forever an establishment figure at its very heart. And his plays, romantic comedies of the upper-middle classes, now resonate powerfully as gay-coded texts by a homosexual man working at a time when the core of his being was both illegal and repugnant to the vast majority of English society.

Still Life is a perfect example of Coward the master of stagecraft. He conceived it originally as part of a cycle of ten one-act plays collectively entitled Tonight at 8.30, which were performed across three evenings. What a brilliant idea! At a time when the West End was creaking with full evenings of frothy pap like Glamorous Night, O Mistress Mine and This’ll Make You Whistle, Coward’s unique production was like a patchwork quilt of original ideas, and it was a smash hit.

Of the ten plays in Tonight at 8.30, Still Life is the most significant, because it went on to be adapted for cinema, and became one of the most beloved British films of all time, Brief Encounter. What makes it special is the way it depicts an overpowering, intoxicating, romantic affair between two people who have to keep their love a secret from everyone around them. There’s an almost unbearable strain between, on the one hand, the British stiff upper lip, the cups of tea, the polite apologies; and, on the other, the helpless passion, the stolen embraces, and the welter of emotion summed up by Rachmaninov’s 2^nd piano concerto.

And in that strain, the magic happens.

Although it’s a story of a man and a woman, the theme of a love that must be hidden from the outside world was beating out of Noël Coward like a tell-tale heart, and when Alec says, “Everything’s against us—all the circumstances of our lives… Let’s enclose this love of ours with real strength, and let that strength be that no one is hurt by it except ourselves,” the gay subtext shows, dolphin-like, above the element it lives in.

The production at The Pilch certainly captures some of the pre-war mood of Coward’s play on the most minimal of sets. The atmosphere is created and maintained by a delicate medley of cocktail-lounge piano music, played live between scenes, and the sound of trains chugging past the platforms does take you back to the age of steam.

But the vital element that’s missing, the elephant that is sadly not in the room, is that there is very little chemistry, intimacy, or – for want of a better word – love, between the two central characters, Alec and Laura. There’s plenty of polite awkwardness, but there are no deserts of vast eternal desire lurking below that awkwardness. “Love has never been easy for anyone” is another of Alec’s lines, and it looks like that was the case during rehearsals. It’s unfortunate, because without that sense of mutual passion, the affair winds up looking unequal. Laura keeps trying to call off their assignations, and Alec keeps forcing her into one more meeting. It looks rather more like coercion than shared desire.

Providing a counterpoint to Laura and Alec’s love-that-dare-not-speak-its-name is the good-natured flirtation between Albert the ticket inspector and Myrtle the café manager. This is much less gloomy, and actually became a more relatable feature of this staging than the main plot. When Albert turfs out some troublesome squaddies like a sheepdog protecting his ewes, I almost felt like cheering. But there’s something wrong when the subplot is better than the main one.

The final scene (as in the film) is the most painful of all: just when Alec and Laura are about to say a tender, final farewell, Laura’s busybody friend Dolly turns up and insists on gossiping while the lovers sit in helpless silence until Alec has to leave. It’s an exquisitely painful and artistically brilliant twist of the knife. But in this production Dolly is played as a completely over-the-top, two-dimensional comedy turn. She seems to have walked straight out of a pantomime. And although she does get some laughs, playing her this way undermines the pain of that scene. (And why, by the way, are her pockets full of jangling cash? Surely Dolly would have a purse?)

So, while it was wonderful to see the ur-text behind one of the great cinematic works of the last century, I was left generally frustrated and flummoxed by this production. Perhaps less a talent to amuse, more a talent to bemuse.