Theatre review by Nick Smurthwaite

So rich and resonant is Three Days of Rain that you suspect it might originally have been intended as a novel or screenplay. There is no doubt that Richard Greenberg’s compelling family drama would have lent itself to whichever form he’d set his mind to. 

The prosaic title refers to a typical entry in the diary of recently deceased Ned Janeway, a celebrated American architect. His neurotic drop-out son Walker (Colin Firth) is hoping to inherit the family home—a world renowned architectural masterpiece designed by Ned and his former partner, Theo—but it’s the emotional legacy he should be worrying about. 

Having avoided his father’s funeral, Walker has finally turned up in New York to confront his exasperated sister Nan (Elizabeth McGovern), and Theo’s son Pip (David Morrissey), an actor in TV soaps and an old flame of Nan’s. The three quarrel, make up, fondly recall the past and bemoan the present.. 

After the interval, we retreat thirty years to meet the previous generation—Ned and Theo (play by Firth and Morrissey), and Lina (McGovern), the quick-witted, hard-drinking lover of both men, who combines the brittleness of Katherine Hepburn with the vulnerability of Blanche Dubois. What we learn about those ‘three days of rain’ makes it clear that this was some kind of understated metaphor for a time of turmoil in the lives of Ned and Theo. Slowly, you begin to understand how the sins of the fathers have been visited on their luckless children. 

Greenberg may sometimes appear to indulge his obvious gift for one-liners, but they are usually consistent with the character speaking them and, as the play develops, any early flashiness gives way to solid story-telling and intelligent exposition. 

Robin LeFevre’s production is cannily understated, allowing three exceptionally strong performances to carry the full force of the text. These are roles that any actor hungry for a challenge would give his or her eye teeth for. Firth, Morrissey and McGovern do not disappoint. 

Now that the Donmar’s boss, Sam Mendes, has emerged as one of the hottest young directors in the States, perhaps we can expect a film version of Three Days of Rain before too long. If so, Mendes would be well advised to retain this tremendous trio. 
 

review by Carole Woods

Somehow my heart always sinks a little when a play opens with a character giving us a biographical rundown of the family history. It’s as if the playwright, mistrustful of the audience, feels compelled to provide guidelines. 

Happily, in Richard Greenberg’s Three Days of Rain, the final play in the Donmar’s short American Imports season, there is a reason for the preamble. This early account delivered by Walker, the disturbed offspring of an acclaimed architect, is flecked with his own subjective inaccuracies. When it comes to families, there ain’t no such thing as absolute truth. 

Walker has returned to New York to reclaim his inheritance—the universally praised house designed by his famous father who has recently died. He is full of bile and bitterness about his mother, whom he likens to “Zelda Fitzgerald’s unstable sister,” and the reticent Great Man. “The thing is with people who never talk,” comments Walker acidly, “you always suppose they’re harbouring some enormous secret. But, just possibly, the secret is, they have absolutely nothing to say.” 

Greenberg, like the two other writers in this series, likes to make sure we know he can turn a sharp-shooting line, and puts plenty in the mouth of Walker. But despite his sardonic wit, Walker remains unreliable and self-obsessed. 

Three Days of Rain thrives on dysfunctionalism—as a child of eight, poor old Walker saw his flakily unstable mother try to commit suicide and has “been in pain” and an absolute pain ever since. 

Colin Firth gives Walker a raddled, clinging appeal as he attempts to glean affection from Elizabeth McGovern’s Nan, the stoic, exasperated sister who has always been there to pick up the pieces (there’s just the tiniest whiff of incest in the air). He rails at Pip (David Morrissey), the son of Ned’s work partner, for stealing from the one thing he prizes—Dad’s model house (Dad in a final twist has left the house not to Walker but to Pip). 

But that is only the half of it. In the good old tradition of the memory play, Three Days of Rain works through flash-back to reframe perceptions of reality that prove to have been rather different to their appearance. 

Greenberg takes a circuitous, slightly fuzzy way to tell it, but his message is ultimately a delicate and not unaffecting one—the false impression we carry of our parents. By the by, he also takes time out to cast off a few other generational and sibling asides as to family guilt, the emotional blackmail of the distressed and the strange dynamic of professional partnerships. 

In the second half, in a carefully laid symmetrical shadow of the first act relationships, Greenberg lays out the truths—how Walker’s parents, Ned and Lina came together, and the bond between Ned and Theo, his workmate and friend. 

Firth, bespectacled and halting as Ned, a man of few words on account of his bad stammer, is almost unrecognisable and deeply moving, whilst McGovern gives Lina a dangerous, attractive, Blanche du Bois emotional volatility. Robin Lefevre directs with an acute sense of the games people play.