Love and the Parternal Triangle

There is an unprecedented spate of new British and Irish plays on Broadway at the moment. We send them The Blue Room, the Weir, Closer, Dame Judy Dench and Sir David Hare.

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.

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