Details

In the early 1940s Noel Coward wrote Brief Encounter, the celebrated celluloid weepy in which characters played by Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard, contemplate an affair in a suffocating suburban world where it will mean disgrace and ruin. Noel Coward was gay and many commentators believe the hit film reflects his own frustrations at a time when homosexuality was illegal and it was impossible for one man to openly love another, or to represent this on stage or screen. Multi-award winning writer/director Phil Willmott takes the world of Brief Encounter as a setting for a completely new play imagining the kind of gay romance Noel Coward and his contemporaries were forbidden to write. A chance encounter at a railway station in 1945 leads two men to consider how much they must sacrifice in order to be together. This evocative, heartbreaking production invites us to consider how far we've come and how much we've still in common with our grandfather's generation.

Creatives/Company

Author: Phil Willmott
Director: Phil Willmott