It’s 1945 in the small town of Carnforth and the most exciting thing to happen is the arrival of the film crew of Brief Encounter. Martin (Mark Kydd) is living at home with his parents when he decides to make his dull life more interesting by becoming an extra. At the station he meets Hugh, the man who will become the fleeting love of his life in a direct parallel with the film.
Twenty-five years later, Martin is in London. He’s gone from being in the chorus of musicals (‘He can sing, dance, and has a brass neck’), to working as a dresser (he’s over 30), when a chance meeting at a the opening night of the musical Mr and Mrs, one half of which is based on Still Life, the play that was adapted into Brief Encounter, gives him the chance to reflect on a life spent in the background.
It’s fabulously gossipy about real people and events. Martin’s mother despises Gracie Fields, the previously popular Rochdale born singer, for marrying an Italian citizen and fleeing to America, possibly to avoid him being interned. Martin thinks less of leading actor, Trevor Howard, because he’s masquerading as a war hero, when in fact, he has been thrown out of the army for pathological lying and mental instability.
Finding out that Trevor is a fraud (if it’s possible for an actor to be a fraud given that being other people is their job) gives Martin some comfort about the deceptions that society forces onto him. When times change, and Quentin Crisp is more open about his situation, Martin prefers to stay quiet, he remembers the days when John Gielgud got arrested in a toilet, and then there’s Joe Orton’s violent end.
The script is very funny, but it’s full of yearning and nostalgia. He sings a version of ‘Underneath the Arches’ that turns it into a romantic ballad, and he dances wistfully to Gene Pitney’s ‘Something’s Gotten Hold of My Heart’. It’s evocative of lost love, and the terrifying way that time passes. Most of the golden age film stars have lost the type of fame where everyone knows their dating history and obsesses over their outfits. In a way they now have the same obscurity as Martin, all but forgotten apart from the characters they played on the silver screen.
He does protest about some things, raging that films set in the North have to be grim, and damning Mr and Mrs as a show with no heart; not an accusation that could ever be thrown at this winner.
Our Martin in the Background has finished its run
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