The Hall of Time

John Caird reflects on his dual role as librettist and director of André Previn’s Brief Encounter.

Writing the libretto for Brief Encounter was a labour of love. The film Brief Encounter is a great favourite of mine and the work of Noël Coward, who wrote the screenplay, has always fascinated me. As playwright, lyricist and performer, Coward’s wit, wisdom and open-heartedness inspired him to create characters that engage our sympathies and our intelligence in equal measure. He laughs at his characters and loves them, too, but never falls into mockery on the one hand or sentimentality on the other. We laugh with him, but with a kindness and understanding that we learn from his treatment of them. Coward’s prose is brilliant. He writes naturalistic dialogue heightened by the rhythms of a natural lyricist. But prose it is and as such it is quite unsingable in its raw form.

Turning any prose into lyric is a tricky and time-consuming business. The British lyricist Don Black likened it to doing your own root canal work. Sung lines must be made shorter than their spoken originals. Even the most modern music has some formal structure within it so composers respond well to patterns of verse that can be used to create coherent musical forms for each scene. The librettist must decide on the form of the sung lines, their length and the shape of the stanzas they are arranged in, whether they rhyme or not and if so, in what scheme.

André and I agreed from the start that we would use rhyme only sparingly in Brief Encounter. We wanted the characters to sound as real as possible—and as free from cliché. Rhyme forces the librettist into conventional and predictable patterns of verse. This can be effective in a comic lyric but reductive in serious drama. I have therefore been quite economic with my rhymes, but less so in the treatment of the more comedically imagined characters, Myrtle and Albert, than with the more serious ones. In shortening the lines, special attention must also be made to their “singability.” Are the words comfortable in the singers’ voices? Do the top notes have sympathetic vowel sounds? Can the phrases be achieved in a single breath or must they be broken up? Root canal work indeed.

André and I took the story of Brief Encounter through a number of drafts before we were both happy with it. We made significant changes to the film scenario. Perhaps the most important was to develop the central drama from a two-character story into a three-character one. In the film Laura’s husband Fred is decidedly peripheral, a somewhat laughable man, obviously devoted to his wife but without a shred of imagination or real understanding. We decided to make him growingly aware of Laura’s predicament, thereby increasing the tension in the final scenes and, at the same time, giving him something to sing about.

We also had to find musical and lyrical correlatives for the essentially visual imagery of the film. We concentrated on the themes of time and memory. Brief Encounter, as the title suggests, is a story full of Time. Laura and Alec meet once a week for seven short weeks and they only have a few hours together each time they do so. They are constantly conscious of the clock and how little time they have to express their feelings for each other.

The theme of memory is embedded in the flashback structure of the story, with Laura acting as her own storyteller, remembering the events of the drama scene by scene as they happened to her.

Other changes were more or less forced on us. In the film, Laura escapes from the routine of her daily life by going to the cinema, and Alec joins her there on more than one occasion. The intimacy of sitting in the dark and sharing the emotion and enjoyment of a movie is a peculiarly apt piece of imagery to include in a film. In an opera house, however, the imagery loses its authority. How do you create a cinema audience on stage? Or does the opera audience see the film the characters are watching? How do you put a film sound track together with an opera score without creating a cacophony?

In finding a more appropriate place of escape for Laura and Alec, I decided to expand on an image that occurs close to the end of the film. Alec borrows a car from a friend and drives Laura out into the country. They stand together for a long time on a little bridge over a river. It is a sad and romantic image, the flow of water under the bridge intensifying the theme of time and the beauty of the setting emphasising the sense of loss they feel at the thought of their inevitable break-up.

I decided to use this riverside setting as the repeated location for Alec and Laura’s romantic assignations. I made the river deeper and wider than in the film, more like the Thames at Oxford where I grew up as a boy. And I gave the river a lock for small boats to pass through and a name to go with it—Eden Lock. Many place names in the English countryside have names redolent of bible stories and this seemed the obvious choice for a place of natural innocence and beauty—a place from which there may be no return for those who visit it.

As I finished writing the libretto I started to think about the physical life of the production that I would also be directing. In my first talks with Bunny Christie, my designer, I emphasised the need for a space that could provide multiple settings with a minimum of scenic shifting, all within the over-arching image of a railway station. This is the location of Alec and Laura’s first encounter and where they habitually meet on subsequent occasions.

A huge station setting has the capacity to house within it other locations or evocations of them. A station bridge can also be a bridge over a river or a lock. Trees growing on a platform can be trees on a street or by a river or in the lobby of a fancy restaurant.

Above all, station halls are halls of Time. In stations, the life and movement of every person is strongly defined by the passage of time. They are also places from which journeys are made, some of them repetitive, others never to be repeated again. As Laura watches Alec’s train disappearing down the track for the last time, the hall becomes a hall of memory with all the locations of her brief encounter and all the longings and grief engendered by it jumbled together in her yearning, troubled mind.

John Caird
Tokyo 2009