The return of a starry cast to the Donmar

BACK in March Three Days of Rain put in a brief appearance as part of the Donmar's American Imports season. It returns for a longer spell in the same poised production, stylishly directed by Robin Lefevre, and with the same splendid cast. Colin Firth, Elizabeth McGovern and David Morrissey play a couple of parts apiece, and out of the six at least two (from Firth and McGovern) had me throwing my critical umbrella to the wind.

As for the other four: well, they lose out to different degrees in the grand scheme of Richard Greenberg's likeable but sometimes surface-deep script. The first half is set in 1995; the second ewinds to 1960. In the first, brother and sister Walker and Nan (Firth and McGovern) reunite with
intimate friend of the family Pip (Morrissey) for the reading of their father's will.

Walker is a neurotic dropout who lays his failings firmly at his parents' feet. Pip, whom Walker resents for being closer to his father than himself, is happy with his lot as a second-rate soap actor. Nan - well Nan is little more than a buffer between the other two.

Fair enough and all perfectly well played, but all really an excuse for Walker to chance upon his father's journal. "Three days of rain" is the first entry: its inscrutability incenses him. "When people never talk to you, you always suppose they are harbouring some enormous secret - but maybe they have nothing to say," he digs away.

Or maybe they do, but in a different way. In the second half the trio play their characters' respective parents. Here Firth and Morrissey are struggling architects Ned and Theo. Theo is theoretically the flamboyant genius, Ned the practical dogsbody, though again appearances fall short of the truth. McGovern plays a flirtatious, hard-drinking, self-aware Southern girl who has an affair with one and then, during that three-day downpour, the other.

Greenberg, I imagine, wants to show how easily the old folk, trying to make the best of their own limitations, can be misunderstood by their children, convinced of their own larger emotional life. Fittingly then, the second half is much more vivid than the first; this is where Firth and, especially, 
McGovern really come into their own, playing off each other with a touching blend of awkwardness and allure, misgiving and giving. Greenberg's script throws up its multiple reflections with a pleasingly light touch and a gentle ironic wit. Hardly ground-breaking, but a welcome revival nonetheless.

© Copyright of The Times 1999