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December 3, 2010
Simply, a lot of theatre fun
Aberle makes her professional debut in Brief Encounter.
TOVA G. KORNFELD
There is an old proverb that says “the apple does not fall far from the tree.” This certainly is true of 24-year-old Rachel Aberle, a community member and actor making her professional “A-house” debut in Brief Encounter, opening this week at the Vancouver Playhouse.
Aberle sat down with the Independent during final rehearsal week. She has had a love of theatre and acting since the age of two, when her mother first took her to an opera in which her father, Stephen Aberle, also an actor, appeared. She was an enthusiastic participant in the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver’s Gotta Sing! Gotta Dance! program from the age of 11-15, attended the highly regarded drama program at Lord Byng High School and graduated, in 2009, from Studio 58, considered to be one of the best theatre schools in Canada and, not incidentally, her father’s alma mater. Her family is very supportive of her career and, while she has not had a chance to actually appear with her father in a show, they both have worked with Anthony Holland, Studio 58 founder, on different productions of The Merchant of Venice.
Brief Encounter, the play, is based on Noel Coward’s 1945 black-and-white film of the same name, which is set in 1938 England and stars Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson. David Lean (Bridge Over the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia) directed. It was nominated for two Academy Awards, Johnson as best actress and Lean as best director, and was recently voted one of the top 100 British films of all time. In her adaptation, playwright Emma Rice presents a fusion of Coward’s original one-act play Still Life and the film, augmented with original, rarely performed Coward songs and seasoned with a healthy dose of slapstick silliness. The play premièred in London in 2008 at the Haymarket Cinema, the same theatre where the film originally opened in 1946, and is currently running on Broadway. The Playhouse staging is a co-production with Manitoba Theatre Centre and is the Canadian première.
The plot revolves around the repressed love affair between two very British, respectable, married people: an idealistic doctor, Alex, and a suburban middle-class housewife, Laura, who have a chance encounter in a tea room at a train station which briefly turns their respective lives upside down. They fall passionately in love but are doomed never to find fulfilment due to moral and societal constraints. Their forbidden love is filled with pathos and drama. Running parallel to their story are two lesser love stories, those of the cheeky working-class tea ladies Myrtle and Beryl and their railway beaus, Albert and Stanley, whose “slap and tickle” affairs are anything but restrained. The action is fast paced and physical, a “theatrical rollercoaster” in the words of director Max Reimer.
The play, although somewhat satirical in its portrayal of certain parts of the tear-jerker source material, honors the film’s essence and morphs into an audio and visual/mixed media treat, using projections of trains, family salons, restaurants, champagne bubbles and even crashing waves as a backdrop for the melancholic romantic theme song, Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2.
In Brief Encounter, Aberle plays five characters, the largest role being that of Beryl, the ditzy tearoom waitress. She has had to master different accents, from Beryl’s nasal twang to the posh tones of “ladies that lunch.” Aberle said that it is a challenge to play multiple characters that are so different, requiring her to make sure that her portrayal of each is unique so that there is no audience confusion. The cast has been working hard, rehearsing eight hours a day, six days a week since the beginning of November. Aberle said she loves the show and the energy behind it. She gets to sing, dance, play a musical instrument – and ride a bicycle.
After the Vancouver run, the next stop is Winnipeg for one month. Aberle describes the show as “a marriage of film and stage with a wow factor that really has something for everyone: a musical component, a heartfelt story, innovative stage techniques, humor, a great cast and a powerful ending. Simply, a lot of fun.”
Although this is very much an ensemble production, with its nine cast members, in the preview staging at least, Aberle stole the show. Her solo, “Mad About the Boy,” and her portrayals of meddling Dolly, the dour waitress in the lunchroom, and the snooty, dog-walking Mrs. Rolandson, displayed an acting maturity that belies her years. This girl is going places – watch for her in the future.
Mairi Babb (who at one point swings from a chandelier), Eric Blais in two lead roles, Lucia Frangione as Myrtle (who does a very interesting one-shoed dance with Jonathan Holmes as Albert) and Charlie Gallant as Stanley, put in strong performances. All of the actors nail their Brit accents. Prior to the show and during intermission, the entire cast, attired in usher/usherette costumes with jaunty hats perched at rakish angles on their heads, sing old-time ditties to entertain the audience.
The set is minimalist and sleek, cleverly using scaffolding to create the needed venues. In the tearoom, the piano does double duty as a counter. With nostalgic costumes, romantic lighting, authentic sound effects and quirky bits and bobs (actors walking in and out of a cinema screen changing from three-dimensional human forms to one-dimensional film images and back, talking puppets representing children, floor mops for dogs and a toy train for the real thing) this production is about as good as it gets for theatre in this town. Don’t miss it.
For tickets, visit vancouverplayhouse.com or call 604-873-3311.
Tova G. Kornfeld is a local writer and lawyer.
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