When the Rain Stops Falling

Synopsis

An epic play spanning four generations and two continents, When The Rain Stops Falling moves from the claustrophobia of a 1950’s London flat to the windswept coast of Southern Australia and into the heart of the Australian desert. When The Rain Stops Falling weaves together a series of interconnected stories, as seven people confront their mysteries of the past in order to understand their future, revealing how patterns of betrayal, love and abandonment are passed on, until finally, well into the future, as the desert is inundated with rain, one young man finds the courage to defy the legacy.

Our Review:

22 May 2009

It takes a long time to work out who’s who and what’s what in Australian playwright Andrew Bovell’s play at the Almeida, but you have two and a quarter uninterrupted hours to do so. It’s neat and it’s fairly enthralling, but I’m not exactly convinced the effort’s worth it.

There’s a hushed and dedicated atmosphere to Michael Attenborough’s production – it’s a little po-faced, and there aren’t many laughs – which tracks family relationships across a time span of eighty years (1959-2039), through climate change in Australia, where there’s a snow blizzard at Ayers Rock in the middle of the desert.

Bovell wrote the award-winning film Lantana (based on one of his plays), a  psychological mystery of failing marriages, and there’s a similar dogged, forensic quality to this story, traced right back to child abuse, a car crash, an alcoholic mother, with constant references to Saturn devouring his children and the flooding in Bangladesh.

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Latest User Review

Gareth James - 16 June 2009:

Mr Coveney really has lost the plot! This is a fine new play spanning 80 years (30 in the future) and four generations of two families in two countries / continents played out with a backdrop of climate change. It's back-and-fore in time episodic structure means you have to work a bit to keep up during an unbroken 125 minutes, but you are certainly rewarded if you do. The production and performances are both beautifully judged. I left the theatre deeply satisfied....

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