Tonight at 8:30 at Jermyn Street Theatre

This afternoon, after completing my Tacita Dean exhibition triptych at the National Gallery (Still Life) and the National Portrait Gallery (Portrait)--the RA's Landscape show having been taken in on Friday--I made my way to the tiny Jermyn Street Theatre to see a matinee of Noel Coward one-acts. It's part of repertory run of nine of the playwright's shorter pieces that the company is dubbing Tonight at 8:30, grouping the shows into three thematic clusters: "Bedroom Farces," "Secret Hearts," and "Nuclear Families." All nine plays are performed by the same repertory of nine actors. You can book for an individual cluster or, if you're especially keen, cram all three clusters in on weekends, when the company does all nine plays in succession, beginning at 11:30 am and ending almost twelve hours later (with lunch and dinner breaks in between).

I only had time for one of the clusters, so I opted for "Bedroom Farces," which includes the following  deliciously subversive one-acts: We Were Dancing, about a woman determined to leave her husband for the man she instantly falls in love with on the dance floor, only to have second thoughts when he turns out to have been previously married; Ways and Means, concerning an unhappily married pair of indebted freeloaders who suddenly face eviction from their latest borrowed guest room, only to solve their problems by taking advantage of an improbable twist of fate; and Shadow Play, about a woman who, facing the prospect of divorce, enters into a drug-induced dream-state in which she relives the early days of her courtship with her husband.

As with most of Coward's work, the dialogue is fast and light, the skewering of bourgeois heteronormative conventions merciless, and the obsession with the lifestyle of the monied upper classes absolute. Plus there's singing and dancing, which was mostly put over very well by the hard working company members, especially given the cramped footprint of the Jermyn Street stage. I was in the first row, sitting right next to the piano, and the actors were at times less than a foot away from me.

But most memorable was my conversation with the woman sitting next to me, a theatre-mad octogenarian who was returning for the evening performance, and who the day before had also seen two plays back-to-back. Then again, so had I, and when I mentioned how much I'd enjoyed The Inheritance, she smiled and nodded knowingly. She also goes to the Edinburgh Fringe for a week every year and sees most of the good stuff before it even heads to London--if it ever does at all. I helped her reset her password for her Groupon account, as she was heading across the road for a discounted dinner between shows and had somehow been locked out of accessing her voucher. She did nod off at times during each of the performances, but I only hope I have a fraction of her energy and curiosity in thirty years--okay, and maybe also a fraction of what I judged from her clothing and jewelry to be her considerable wealth.

P

In Brief

Last night, Richard and I did something we haven't done at the theatre in a long time, if ever: we walked out at intermission. The show was the Vancouver Playhouse production of Brief Encounter, Emma Rice's adaptation of the 1946 David Lean film, itself based on the one-act play, Still Life, by Noel Coward. Never mind that Max Reimer's production is as all-over-the-place and mish-mashy as his cast's accents; the play itself is a travesty of styles and tone, a burlesque of Lean's beautifully restrained film, which zeroed in with unflinching intensity on its two principals' willed suppression of their desire for each other. The train station tea shop was a perfect metaphor for the temporal fleetingness and what ifs that defined their relationship: but in another place, at another time, they might have been allowed to remain together.

By opening up the action to the supporting characters in the shop, Rice creates some additional stage business to be sure, but why clutter that up with so many theatrical tricks? Puppets, song and dance numbers, toy trains, a bicycle, and all the winking acknowledgements of the audience--and that was just the first act! Then there's the piece's integration of filmed sequences into the live action on stage, the element that seems most to have caught audiences' imaginations in the UK and on Broadway, where the show just closed after what I gather was a reasonably successful run. I don't know what all the hoopla is about--the effects were really quite pedestrian, to my mind, and made what The Electric Company did earlier this fall with Tear the Curtain! seem downright genius (which, as you may recall, I also had major caveats about).

There was a twinge, as we collected our coats, about not sticking around to see what the production does with Alec's fellow doctor-friend, Stephen Lynn, whose flat Alec borrows for an aborted rendez-vous with Laura in the film. As Richard Dyer has famously--and most convincingly--argued, Stephen is quite clearly coded as gay, and it would have been interesting to see what Rice does with this in our post-Wolfenden, post-queer, post-post era. However, after the butchering of Rachmaninoff to close Act 1, we decided it wasn't worth sticking around to find out.

P.