The Stage

Three Days of Rain

Published Wednesday 11 February 2009 at 11:45 by Jeremy Austin

At the end of Act I of Richard Greenberg’s laterally observed family drama, Nan proclaims that she is not sure what to derive from what has just happened.

It’s a feeling that some in the audience may share. But patience is the key in this drama, which turns out to be better constructed than is at first obvious.

Apparently Greenberg himself has joked that the play should come with a warning: “Some assembly required.” And he’s not wrong.

Soutra Gilmour’s beautifully realised set, evocatively lit by Jon Clark, is the downtown Manhattan flat that has, we learn, been occupied by father and son with a space of some 30 years in between.

It is here, in 1995, that we find Walker, played by James McAvoy, a disturbed young man who has appeared after a year’s absence to hear his father’s will. His sister Nan, played by Lindsey Marshal, is a suburbanite trying to control him and their deranged mother. Their time on stage, it turns out, is to put flesh on the bones of the plot that unites their parents some 35 years before and which makes up Act II.

It is fortunate that they have even this meager reason for their existence. This first act is lazy. The characters merge into one big, urgent, shouty mess of folk who seem to love/hate/annoy/comfort each other in quick succession. It gives the impression that the audience is the only sober guest at a coke-fuelled party.

Nigel Harman as Pip, the son of their father’s best friend and architectural partner Theo, shouts and emotes along with the rest.

But then it’s Act II, and subtle performances are drawn out of all three as they play their own parents - even McAvoy, who has to contend with a stammer as being the cheap way of letting the less intelligent in the audience realise he is now playing, Ned, a different character.

If the first act was lazy - pieces to the audience narrated in different dramatic lighting are always a cop-out way to advance a plot - the second is a reasonably well-crafted set of character/relationship studies.

McAvoy comes alive, shrugging off the cliched stammer to create a sensitive, well-rounded character. Harman, playing Pip’s father Theo, is less fortunate. Father is slightly angrier than son and - well, that’s about it.

But it is Marshal who is able to shine. Mentally ill characters are always a rich vein for actors to mine, but Marshal finds the vulnerability and the joy in her otherwise doomed Lina.

It is interesting that in Ned, the pivotal character in the play, Greenberg has created a character who cannot express himself. There is a feeling that there is much more waiting to be discover in Three Days of Rain, but somehow an inability to communicate it on the part of the author means that, rather like the mysterious diary hidden under the bed, it can only be vaguely deciphered.

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