Naomi Frederick

Naomi Frederick

It's not easy inheriting on stage one of the most iconic of all screen roles, but that's the happy (as it happens) fate that has befallen Naomi Frederick, the sparky Oxford and RADA graduate who is playing to full houses at a onetime central London cinema (the Cineworld Haymarket) in the Kneehigh stage premiere of Brief Encounter. This is a version for the theater of the 1945 Noël Coward film, directed by David Lean, that famously starred Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard as two lovers, Laura and Alec, who meet at a railway station and whose passion proves—and this is giving very little away—to be short-lived, indeed. In adapting so venerable a source, director Emma Rice has gone back to the one-act Coward play, Still Life, that spawned the film and added in bits of Coward the songsmith, as well. The result is at once the most rapturous production of the year so far and a happy shot in the arm for a West End that, yes, on occasion can think outside the box. Broadway.com spoke to Frederick, one recent afternoon during the naptime of the 14-month-old daughter, Molly, that she has with her husband, director Toby Frow (Some Kind of Bliss): the optimal moment for a leisurely and friendly chat.

Your daughter's asleep, so this is your telephone time?
Yes. My daytimes are kind of busy until she goes to sleep!

This must be such an extraordinary experience, not least because Kneehigh is finding a mainstream audience that [the Cornwall-based company] has never had before. But this is your first venture with a troupe, many of whom have been acting together for several decades. Did you ever feel the outsider?
I'd been a fan of Kneehigh for a while and had met [director Emma Rice] previously a couple of years before when the Complicite Measure For Measure [in which Frederick played Isabella] was still running and we were both really excited and thought it would be lovely to work together when the time was right. You're right that the majority of the company have been together for a long time, though there are a few who had only worked with Emma on A Matter of Life and Death [last year at the National]. But that didn't bother me too much. I always knew that the way the production had to work, Laura's story and Alec's had to be separate in some way from the rest of the world around them; we wanted to set the lovers apart, so perhaps it was an advantage that I was coming from different waters and also that the Kneehigh spirit is very open and free. I wasn't worried that I'd feel like the new girl.

Tristan Sturrock and Naomi Frederick Brief Encounter

Presumably, the process, as you say, is very fluid.
Emma's work is very rough and ready, and I say that in the most complimentary sense. The rehearsal room has the most open feel; anything goes, really. It's not like you have to have a particular number of skills, though she does tend to pick people who can dance, do acrobatics, play an enormous number of instruments.

Indeed. You get to play Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto—well, some of it anyway—on the piano.
I do, though I don't have to play it note for note, thank heavens. When I was at school, I worked for my grade eight [proficiency exam] but then after school I was a student at Oxford and then at RADA and then I lived in an apartment without a piano, so it's frightening the way you lose the skill; I'm not grade eight anymore.

But I gather from the fantastically witty programme for the play that you have experienced your own sort of brief encounter, albeit very different from Laura's.
Yes, it happened on tour with the RSC to Washington, D.C. where we went twice one year. The first time, I was playing Celia in Gregory Thompson's production of As You Like It and we were staying in these serviced apartments where the doorman who used to hand out our keys just took a complete shine to me. One day, he organized a taxi for me to come out and meet his whole family and then before I knew it, we were all going out to a restaurant.

Was this love?
He was a honey but I wasn't attracted to him; I loved my boyfriend—who's now my husband—back home. But I couldn't just brush this man away, so I thought, oh no, I think I'm going to have to explain myself to him. The thing was that he was from China, and I think he just had completely different expectations from mine; he read my behaviour differently. Then we went back to Washington again with The Tamer Tamed and The Taming of the Shrew and Danny, the Chinese doorman, was there again. It was very nice to see him but by that stage, he knew where he stood [laughs].

Naomi Frederick in Brief Encounter

That's the thing: we've all known brief encounters of some kind or other.
I think that's what Coward was writing—that these encounters really are unavoidable. There's hardly a person who goes through life without encountering the pain of love in some form or other, whether it's in the form of an affair or not. Love, when it seems to turn against you or go out of your control: I think everybody encounters that in their lifetime and if they don't, then somebody close to them does.

So this is something, in a sense, that Laura has to experience.
I think Laura does absolutely have to go through this, and the way Emma and I have talked about it, she has in some way through her marriage to Fred and having the children and moving to middle England put to bed something of herself; some of her spirit has been put away in a drawer somewhere. Alec reawakens that spirit: she suddenly realizes how much of herself she's cut off, rather like cutting off a limb. Suddenly she breathes again and remembers the person she really is. It is like a reawakening, and Alec is the catalyst for that.

So was she better to have loved and lost or would it have been better if Laura had never loved at all?
This woman's going to take a while to recover from the impact of this encounter and Alec's departure, but she isn't going to go back to being the person she was. Her life has been changed; I think that's what makes the ending tolerable.