All too Brief Encounter

As I mentioned in my blog preview of the show, Brief Encounter is up for a slew of awards. Those are for the West End production last year. This new collaboration with Northampton's Royal & Derngate to put together a touring version is simply wonderful and will garner all the plaudits that really matter - from grateful audiences.

Take the chance to see it (it's at Northampton until February 28) and I guarantee you will leave the theatre smiling, with a new spring in your step, probably humming to yourself, and with memories renewed of all sorts of emotional entanglements you've laughed or cried yourself through. It's a very special experience - as heart-stopping as an affair.

Like all the work of Kneehigh's director Emma Rice, Brief Encounter takes a text so familiar that it has entered cultural currency - like a folk tale - and makes us look at it in a fresh way, opening up new meanings and possibilities. It dusts off a cliché that's become embedded in our cultural consciousness and makes it bright and new - recapturing through joy and laughter universal moments of the human experience.

And if all that sounds a bit heavy going, a tad PhD-ish, forget it. This is a wonderful evening's entertainment, heart-rending songs, cack-handed spoon playing, cucumber sandwiches (very nice, too) served to a slightly disbelieving audience, and the smiling lovers and station staff mingling with the crowds in the foyer as they wait for the performance to begin.

It's fabulous, complicated fun, with the zest of a variety show, touches of louche cabaret, lovely puppet work, nods and winks to the punters who are treated with respect and intelligence - we're all in this together, the show seems to say, a bit like life. Classic Kneehigh stuff, in fact.

Revel in high emotion, low comedy and, above all, enjoy the stunning ensemble performances and brilliant technical effects, all newly-worked up in-house and sure to cement Northampton's reputation as a powerhouse of exciting theatre.

What is so clever about the performances is that they take our expectations of the show - the Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard accents, for instance, and the banter of the 'lower orders' in the station buffet - and plays with them in a very sophisticated way to re-establish novel connections with a new, knowing audience.

The cast double as singing cinema staff, and the idea of going to the pictures is never far below the surface - even the ushers' torches echo the spotlights of the 20th Century Fox logo.

Hannah Yelland and Milo Twomey are magnificent and moving as Laura and Alec - grabbing these legendary characters and making them very much their own. You can't imagine Trevor Howard breaking your heart with a song or Celia Johnson hanging from a chandelier in a tide of emotion then coming down to earth - literally - when her affair looks like being discovered.

They both beautifully convey the sense of little people caught in the grip of huge, life-changing events and the production, like the film, makes subtle use of the railway metaphors and piquant dashes of physical theatre.

There are also magnificently comic yet touching turns (I use the word deliberately) from other pairings. Annette McClaughlin and Joseph Alessi are the buffet lovers, more Carry On than Coward, and Beverly Rudd and Christopher Price are the Wayne and Waynetta of their day. All of them break your hearts while tickling your ribs - quite a knack.

It would be possible to analyse the show in class terms, with the hierarchy of behaviours and expectations from the various social levels. And there has always been the Coward subtext of forbidden gay passion. It's all there if you want to explore it. Or simply enjoy the great songs and the brilliant comedy - Beverly Rudd's lapdog moment is hilarious, for instance.

A fantastic, uplifting entertainment for grown-ups, so engrossing it passes all too briefly. But some of the most important things in life are like that, aren't they? You'll want to remember every minute - always, always.