Swingtown.(opening of movies and plays)

Byline: editor: Valerie Steiker

Adam Green crosses the Atlantic for a whirlwind tour of London's most exhilarating new shows.

Broadway impresarios have been beating a path to the Cinema Haymarket, where Kneehigh Theatre's Brief Encounter, an exuberant reimagining of David Lean's classic 1945 big-screen weeper, has become one of the biggest hits of the season. The expressively stoic Tristan Sturrock and Naomi Frederick, a beauty straight out of the golden age of film, play a star-crossed duo, each married to someone else, who meet in a tea shop at a railway station, fall hopelessly for each other, and then sacrifice their love on the altar of duty.

Here, Lean's film, which captures the quiet despair of middle-class English life (from a script by Noel Coward), has been burst open. Characters step in and out of black-and-white film sequences, accompany themselves to Coward songs on the ukulele, and rise like champagne bubbles to swing from chandeliers.

Over dinner at St. Alban, Kneehigh's quicksilver director, Emma Rice, talks about bringing a much-loved movie masterpiece to the stage. "I adore the film, but I didn't want to treat it as a sacred text," she tells me. "I wanted to explore issues of class and sexuality and conformity." Rice pauses and grins. "Oh, let's face it--I wanted to do Brief Encounter because I'm a hopeless romantic."

Next stop: the Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth's electro-modernist opera Lost Highway, based on David Lynch's 1997 neo-noir. Under the American director Diane Paulus, this coproduction between the Young Vic and the English National Opera captures the lurid menace of Lynch's film with stylish ingenuity. At the opening-night party, I chat with Paulus, whose upcoming production of Hair in Central Park represents, she says, the fulfillment of a dream that began when she first memorized the cast album as a little girl.

One day, four shows. Mark Ravenhill's The Mikado/The Odyssey, two of the sixteen plays that make up the author's Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat, at the National Theatre, are more admirable than compelling. But where else can one find audiences queuing up for theater at eleven in the morning? Much more satisfying is this afternoon's Major Barbara. Giving all-but-perfect performances, Simon Russell Beale, as the clear-eyed arms dealer Andrew Undershaft, and Hayley Atwell, as his idealistic Salvation Army daughter Barbara, square off in a production by Nicholas Hytner that makes Shaw's 1905 contrarian masterpiece gleam.