Age: 27. “I‘m 10 years older than Stanley,” the ukulele and even banjolele-playing teenager he inhabits so beautifully in the fresh theatrical take on Noel Coward’s
Brief Encounter.
Hometown: Bristol in the West Country, where McLoughlin played in bands for years before studying drama in Cardiff, Wales, and then coming to London to take up acting. The milieu in which he grew up was “very working class,” and a life in the arts wasn’t ever spoken of as an option. His mother was a florist and his father was at the forefront of the video rental business in the early days prior to chain superstores like Blockbuster. (His parents are now divorced and his dad has moved to Spain.) “When I was going to school and saying I wanted to be a musician, they were all saying, ‘Pick something more realistic, like the building trade,’ but that stuff was never for me,” says McLoughlin, who’s done more than OK in his thespian pursuits so far. Besides his career-making current gig, he was in Coram Boy at the National, playing Thomas Ledbury, and he suffered a grim fate at the hand of Rhys Ifans in the film Elizabeth: the Golden Age.
Currently: Lending genuine sweetness and a lovely, clear singing voice to the part of Brief Encounter’s Stanley, who sells refreshments on the railway platform where Tristan Sturrock’s Alec meets Naomi Frederick’s Laura. While their highly emotional love story plays out center stage, director Emma Rice’s adaptation of the celebrated David Lean film, and its one-act play source Still Life, allows for two other contrasting romances, one of which is between the eager, guileless Stanley and his beloved Beryl (Amanda Lawrence). “I don’t think they’ve had sex or anything like that,” McLoughlin says of the fresh-faced couple: “They’re very young and innocent. It’s enjoyable to play the lightness of that. Alec and Laura have lots of responsibilities, but Stanley and Beryl have no responsibilities at all.” It’s nice, too, McLoughlin reports with a laugh, to play a greatly expanded version of a part that in the Trevor Howard/Celia Johnson movie only gets “about four seconds of screen time: there’s a bit in the background where Stanley runs off with Beryl and Alec is in the foreground looking perturbed and heartbroken.”
Flying (Knee) High: This is McLoughlin’s second project with Rice and her innovative Cornwall-based Kneehigh company, which is marking its West End debut with this production in a onetime cinema on central London’s Haymarket. The first was last summer’s National Theatre adaptation of another iconic British film, A Matter of Life and Death, at the National Theatre. “That had a huge cast of 25”—Brief Encounter’s male lead Sturrock included—“so being a first-time Kneehigh-er on that production, it was easy to feel kind of like a bit player, drowned out by everyone else’s ideas. To be given the opportunity to do something else, to really use my talents as much as possible: I’m glad I chose to do this.”
No Doubt: A Matter of Life and Death got some mixed reviews, even going so far as to spark a controversy about Britain’s aging male critics being out of touch both with female directors and their own readership. But McLoughlin says he felt no hesitation at all about taking on Brief Encounter. “I remember when Emma [Rice] asked me to do it, and I felt very excited because she has such a unique and original take on things, so I must say I didn’t doubt it ever. Having said that, I wasn’t hugely familiar with the film beforehand, and I wasn’t emotionally attached to it in the way that a lot of movie lovers might bring an emotional attachment and want not to like it; that wasn’t one of my considerations at all. If I was going to be precious about anything like that, that could only stand between me and the work.”
Close Encounters of the Brief Kind: McLoughlin expands upon his own personal “brief encounter,” as briefly indicated in the show’s program. “I must have been about 13, and my best friend and I were going to the south of France on an adventure holiday.” On the ferry over, he recalls, chuckling, “we just wandered around and found these French girls and tried to communicate with them as best we could, the four of us all walking around the whole ferry together. But as soon as we got to where we were going, they went off and we went off and we barely said anything to them; we never even found out their names. That was a very brief encounter.”