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Photo courtesy of John Haynes |
Elegant quest for a lost father
WHEN THE RAIN STOPS FALLING
Almeida Theatre
DO you look into a mirror and see your father’s eyes?
Heard yourself repeating a phrase of your mother’s? Catch yourself in behaviour you criticised in them? What else do they pass on to us? Are the sins of the fathers truly upon the heads of the sons?
True or not, you can’t help but wonder about your parent’s lives, especially if you never really knew them.
At the centre of this play by Australian dramatist Andrew Bovell is a young Englishman whose father “left” when the boy was only seven years old. His mother never spoke of him. All young Gabriel Law knew was that his father sent him a series of post cards from Australia: discovered in his mother’s sewing table. Grown up, he sets out for Australia to go to the places where those cards were posted to try to capture something of his father.
But this is not just the story of a quest for an identity; it is a study in difficult generational relations, the damage we do to each other without intention. Spanning four generations it begins in 2039 in rain, real rain, with a fish dropping from the sky in a world where climate change has made fish virtually extinct – the result of earlier generations’ reckless exploitation. Time and place then shuffle back and forth to 1959 and from London to Australia. Different actors play young and old versions of some characters. We see them all at one point at one table; later, as time segments overlap, they co-exist with their older or younger selves.
Gabriel’s mother retreats into alcohol. The parents of a girl he meets in a highway café, also called Gabrielle, both killed themselves, her younger brother was abused and murdered. As we discover guilty secrets, the same phrases, the same fish soup, recur through the generations.
Though elegantly written there is perhaps more form than content here but director Michael Attenborough, with the help of minimalist but stunning design by Miriam Buether, Lorna Heavey’s video projections and atmospheric music and sound from Stephen Warbeck and Paul Arditti, has created a beautiful theatrical experience. There are some fine performances, especially from Richard Hope in an opening monologue, waiting for a son he has not seen for twenty years, Naomi Bentley as the younger Gabrielle, Phoebe Nicholls as the drink-numbed mother and Lisa Dillon as her when young. Only when it is over do you realise it has played for two hours without an interval.
Until July 4
020 7359 4404
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