And what do we get in return?  Well Neil Simon is still a going concern.
And the Donmar is presenting an American season of new plays.  
Three Days of Rain  introduces a very clever, if rather dry and
schematic young dramatist called Richard Greenberg.  

And we do him proud.  Colin Firth, Elizabeth  McGovern and David Morrissey
add flesh and passion to two overlapping triangulaar love stories in New
York.

First, 1995: a brother and sister of a lately dead architect pick over what
happened, the legacy, the house that must be lived in.
The son of the architect's partner, a TV actor who eats chocolate and
doesn't put on weight, reveals his affair with the architect's daughter.
Cut backwards, after the interval, to 1960.

The same three actors play the two architects and the girl who left one for
the other in three days of rain: wet, wet, wet.  Lucidity of writing and
the pointed, precise playing in robin Lefevre's smart production on a
pristine white setting brings us all together.

The emotional switch is beautifully handled.  Miss McGovern is stunning as
a calculating Southern Belle whose weakness for drink parallels that of her
daughter, while Firth heads backwards from nerdy inheritor  to stuttering,
awakening artist of the drawing board.  And the wonderful Morrissey
redifines his Nineties nerve as Sixties cool , finally left our in the
rain, like the cake in the pop song.  It is heartening to hear good writing
emerging from off Broadway again.  I just wonder, though, if these
triangular, interconnecting designs for living will carry too parochial, or
dare one say pointless, a punch.

 © Copyright of Daily Mail 1999