Colin Firth and Elizabeth McGovern in Three Days  of Rain. Photograph by Neil Libbert

Firth Among Equals

Three Days of Rain Donmar
Warehouse

‘Colin Firth is amazing. He is completely convincing as a pinched neurotic.
As the neurotic’s father, he is a is miracle of corrugation’

ANYONE WHO believes in national characteristics should go to see Richard Greenberg’s new play at the Donmar. The pivotal figure in Three Days of Rain is a compendium of traditional English attributes: he is ironic, sexually inhibited and diffidently courteous; he lives in damp conditions and he wears an unappealing cardigan. He is also American.

Actually, he is quintessentially American. Another character describes him acutely as making those around him ‘emotionally fastidious to the point of paralysis’, a description which would fit half the cast of a Henry James novel. And Greenberg’s play is in several respects distinctively transatlantic. Its preoccupation with the past, its middle-class setting and its leisurely loquaciousness set it apart from most new British drama. Quick phrases and an unusually expressive structure mark it out as the work of a pungent writer. 

This is a drama about family secrecy and inheritance which makes its points by art-fulness of form and clever doubling of parts, as well as by debate. In the first half of the play, a brother and sister meet for the reading of their architect father’s will. An ex-lover of the woman’s, the son of their father’s partner, arrives; it turns out that he is a chief beneficiary of the will. Why? The second half answers the question by going back 30 years to the Sixties and tracing a crucial period in the lives of these characters’ mothers and fathers: each actor now plays her or his parent. The device — with its deceiving resemblances and differences —graphically explains how misunderstanding rumbles through generations.

This is a tremendous piece for actors and it is tremen-dously well-served by these actors. Each of them does something surprising. Elizabeth McGovern begins with insufficient variation on two modes — ecstatic or aghast — but in the second half of the play slips elegantly into some-thing Southern, luscious and languorous. Her command to her future lover — ‘Say some-thing small to me while I’m changing’ — comes near to a classic invitation. David Morrissey, taking the trickiest part — that of the nice bloke who is there to show that ‘being in a good mood is not the same as being a moron —proves to have a huge gift for comedy as well as pathos: his easy, complacent cajoling of the audience on his first entry enlarges the sympathies of the play at a stroke. And Colin Firth is amazing. He is com-pletely convincing as a pinched and bullying neurotic. As the neurotic’s self-effacing and secretly success-ful father, he is a miracle of corrugation.
 

© Copyright of The Observer 1999