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David Lean's classic 1946 film "Brief Encounter," about a clandestine emotional love affair between two straitlaced, middle-class Brits, with spouses and kids at home, is the picture of lip-quivering emotional restraint — the kind of film where the character's feelings are so stifled they make the Queen of England look like Ethel Merman.

But when Kneehigh Theatre artistic director Emma Rice set out to adapt and direct a stage version of "Brief Encounter," based on Noël's Coward's original one-act play Still Life, she wanted to bring to life those passionate emotions simmering under the character's repressed demeanors — to show the fissures in their constrained visages and muted voices.

The idea, says Rice, is to show what's happening internally with these characters — Alec, a married doctor, and Laura, a housewife and mother of two — by allowing the audience glimpse the power of their fatally fraught emotions and unconsummated love affair. "I think that's part of the tragedy of the story: That they, for a moment, discover a new sense of themselves. And I think as an audience, we want to see a glimmer of that — not just guess that it's there. We want them to see what their lives could be."

	Tristan Sturrock in Brief Encounter
	photo by Joan Marcus

The result is a visually arresting show bursting with vibrant explosions of stage magic — delightful musical numbers, unexpected aerials, literal crashing waves of emotion, projected black-and-white film clips, characters who melt from the stage into the two dimensions of a movie screen, and hilariously anarchic stage gags (a pair of patrician ladies with dogs fashioned out of floor mops practically brings the house down).

The Kneehigh production of Brief Encounter, which played at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn last winter and then toured to several U.S. cities, now plays Broadway's Studio 54 as part of Roundabout Theatre Company's 2009-10 season.

Rice agrees that audiences sometimes get too mired in the world of theatrical naturalism, forgetting the power of inventive, imaginative stagecraft; indeed, theatre offers unique advantages and perspectives that a medium like film cannot.

"We see real life every day. We wake up to our partners every day and negotiate life with them," says Rice, who will also bring Kneehigh's staging of The Red Shoes to St. Ann's Warehouse this fall. "We don't need to see that on stage. I don't need to see that on stage. I live it. I want to see something that makes my mind stir and makes me feel something in a fresh way and see things with new eyes. I want things to surprise people, because we live with the ordinary all the time."

Since taking over as artistic director at Kneehigh, Rice says she's brought an emotional and personal connection to the work — and that she's challenged the company to match that, to push themselves into vulnerable territory.

Tristan Sturrock and Hannah Yelland in Brief Encounter

photo by Joan Marcus