Brief Encounter

Went to a play yesterday at the urging of Ilan, one of our teachers. Not sure how often I can do this (even with the discount, it cost £20), but it was so highly recommended as a piece of physical theatre, which is what the school's about, that I splurged and went. i was glad I did.

The play was a staged version of “Brief Encounter,” played in a grand old movie theater on Haymarket Street near Trafalgar Square. Kneehigh Theatre was the company. A very talented ensemble. The production was very creative, incorporating projected scenes that looked like an old black-and-white film. Early on one character stepped through the screen from in front of it (the screen had vertical slits in it) and then appeared in the movie itself. The show included a lot of music, a bit of puppetry, a lot of movements by the actors to indicate things like a door opening and the cold wind blowing in, or how everything jumps and rattles in a café that sits right next to the tracks as a train rumbles by. Projected images of the ocean became a metaphor for passion and turmoil. And the pacing was so very tight. So well done.

When I met Thomas Prattki, the school founder at the Guthrie this summer, I remarked to him that i"d love to get some insight into how he watches a play. Maybe this is a first step toward that. There's so much to attend to in a production--so much more than I paid attention to before (like how the stage is or isn't balanced by the placement and movement of the actors, or the pacing and rhythm of the dialogue). The mind reels with all the elements that go together in those fleeting moments that build the whole experience.

I'm getting closer to being wiling to try to describe what we do at this school actually, but I don't want to get too bogged down in the details. Especially for someone like me, this isn't only a theatre school--though I am getting a better sense of how to watch a play. (Maybe it's a bit like how I thought, a while back, that the best way to learn how to be a lay member of a church is to serve one as clergy. But that's a longer story too.)