The boys and girls in the band are mingling with the riff-raff in the cheap seats at the start of Elizabeth Newman’s staging of one of the finest of twentieth century romances. They could be one more cafe bar combo providing a background soundtrack to the sort of everyday liaisons that never make the headlines.
So it goes in Emma Rice’s adaptation of David Lean’s 1945 film, which saw Noel Coward expand his 1936 one-act play, Still Life, about a very English affair between a housewife on an away day and a doctor cutting loose on his Thursday commute.
Rice’s version was originally seen in 2008, when she was in charge of Kneehigh Theatre, and mixes and matches Coward’s two takes on the story in a perennial playful rendering clearly relished by her Pitlochry ensemble.
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As soon as Matthew Trevannion’s Alec removes a protuberance from the eye of Kirsty Stuart’s Laura, the cut-glass politesse of their initial meeting accelerates to a passion that moves faster than the trains that speed through the station.
Meanwhile, several more dalliances play out among the station staff inbetween waiting tables and cleaning up other peoples mess that might well have more hope of a happy ending.
As Jen McGinley’s Edward Hopperesque set swishes in and out to Stu Barker’s original music that plays inbetween a few Coward classics, it is as if Laura and Alec’s fleeting liberation from domestic torpor has woken all around them.
It is telling too, perhaps, that while we see Laura’s lovably safe husband Fred, played with avuncular charm by Keith Macpherson, Alec’s wife is only spoken of.
Newman’s beautifully turned out production taps into a world where loyalty and fidelity trumps a last gasp stand at passion.
This may look old fashioned, but, as Laura and Fred settle down for a life of civilised silences, but it remains an all too familiar tune.
Brief Encounter runs at Pitlochry Festival Theatre 16 June to 29 September. Click here for tickets and more information.
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