Click here to watch footage of Brief Encounter

In Piccadilly Circus, two minutes’ walk from the cinema where Kneehigh’s theatrical adaptation of Brief Encounter is playing, there’s a stage version of Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps that’s deep into its third year and remains a fine example of how to honour a mid-20th-century film and retain its tension while gently and affectionately spoofing it. Could the cult company from Cornwall match, even surpass, that feat?

Much to my surprise, it could and can. After Kneehigh’s Matter of Life and Death, which took another beloved period movie and turned it into an irksome blend of the politically correct and visually irrelevant, I had half-expected a searing indictment of British repression, complete with giant replicas of stiff or even starched upper lips falling from the flies. But Emma Rice’s staging of Noël Coward’s screenplay is a delight: moving, funny, gripping and, even at its most inventive, true to the original and its all-English heart.

Rice and her company entertainingly exploit the old Cineworld Cinema, giving us actors dressed as 1930s usherettes, starting with credits on a screen behind a crinkly red curtain, and proceeding to mix the live and the canned. A Dover-bound express roars on film past the railway refreshment room where the piece is mostly set. There are projections of billowing waves as Naomi Frederick’s sweetly shy and unaffectedly dignified Laura and Tristran Sturrock’s warm and decent Alec start continue and end their strangulated romance.

Somehow these cliché images don’t grate. Nor do the balletic and even aerial effects that reflect and accompany the principals’ intensifying emotions. That’s because Frederick and Sturrock perform together almost more beautifully than Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard in the film. The accents are in-period but never to the point of parody. Likewise with the feelings seething beneath the surface. Who would have thought that Alec’s talk of silicosis and pneumoconiosis – he’s a doctor – could be so quietly yet passionately Pinteresque?

Certainly, you don’t laugh when Laura says: “How silly we are, how unbearably silly”; or, later: “I feel so utterly degraded.” You believe Alec when he says: “I love you with all my heart and soul” and her when she replies: “I want to die, if only I could die.” There’s plenty of detail for nostalgia-freaks – rock cakes, which are just that, and phrases such as “old girl” – but the central emotions are strong and immediate. I could have done without Kneehigh’s one silliness, the scooter on which a skivvy called Beryl whizzes about, but her flirtation with a goofy local lad achieves what it should. Like the good-natured tyrant of the refreshment room, who lets a bumbling ticket inspector court her, she provides a lively comparison with the anguished Laura and Alec. Was it worth transposing Brief Encounter from screen to stage? You bet.

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