When the Rain Stops Falling - Almeida Theatre

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Imogen Knight and Michael Attenborough in rehearsalPhoto: Bridget JonesAlmeida Theatre Artistic Director, MichaelAttenborough, fell in love with this play when hefirst read writes here about his love of the play andwhat it means to be directing this production forthe Almeida.What an extraordinary odyssey it’s been to get here. Itstarted with an International Shakespeare Workshop, nearlytwo years ago, in Australia, I had to keep pinching myselfthat I was being paid to go to Australia, to work onShakespeare, with four English actors and six Australianactors in the most staggeringly beautiful surroundings. Andin that week I asked the Sydney Theatre Company if theycould fix up for me to meet as many writers and directorsand a few agents as I could; I also saw lots of shows.And two key things happened: I met Andrew Bovell’scharming agent and we talked about Andrew’s work; and Ialso had the wonderful experience of seeing Leah [Purcell] ina show. Andrew’s agent sent me When the Rain StopsFalling and I finished it and rather ungenerously decided thatI was quite prepared to murder anyone who got in my way ofdirecting it! And then, about a year after the first visit, I wentout to Australia again, and spent four lovely days withAndrew in his farm, with his wife and son, and we didwonderful things like drive round the Coorong, and it wasthen that I decided that Leah Purcell be a wonderful olderGabrielle.What’s this play about? I think it asks a very, veryfundamental question, which is: how do we find out who weare? What is our identity? Where have we come from? And aswith a lot of people’s lives, actually understanding our pastenables us to read our present and even begin to sense ourfuture. And it also questions how the things that we can’tsee, the things that maybe we’ve been prevented fromseeing, the things that have been stopped, denied us,accidentally or very deliberately, contribute to who we are.From the Director...and I find myself thinkingabout this man again, thisfair-skinned Englishmanand wondering who hewas... and what happenedto him.Gabriel LawAt the risk of playing on the fluidity of the title of the play, Ithink that that sense of a stream, the emotional ‘flow’ insideus, as we go out every day and live our lives, and ourpersonalities change and develop, as they have from being alittle tiny baby. That flow, for almost everybody in the play,has either been stopped or broken, rendered dysfunctional,or actually blocked. And one by one, each one of thesecharacters either chooses to, or determinedly seeks to,complete that flow, literally unblock the emotional plug. Andtherefore the story of the play is one of repair. I found myselfwriting lots of words like ‘repair’, ‘regeneration’,‘redemption’, and even ‘reverberation’, as these people’slives bounce off each other, rub up against each other, andindeed find out more and more how they interlock.I don’t think this play, this story, could’ve been written in anyother medium but theatre: it’s truly theatrical. If you use theword ‘theatrical’, people tend to think that you mean rather‘larger than life, loud and flamboyant’; but in fact I think theword ‘theatrical’, in relation to Andrew’s play implies thereverse: it allows you to understate, to suggest things, for apicture or an image or a thread, or a repetition to reverberateand resonate through the evening. Characters playing theAlmeida Projects: When the Rain Stops Falling by Andrew Bovell18
Michael Attenborough and the cast in rehearsalPhoto: Bridget JonesDear Son, in the desert, on aclear night, if you knowwhere to look, you can seethe planet Saturn. The wordplanet derives from theGreek and means wanderer.Saturn is named after theRoman god who devouredhis own son. Forgive me.Your loving Father, HenryLawHenry Lawordinary key moments in their lives, and the older version ofthemselves watching from a completely different era, you’d findjolly difficult to do on film. But the theatre does that and says somuch without ‘saying it’.There are seven characters in this play, and you will find linksbetween the seven popping up quite frequently in this play. It’sinteresting how the longevity of the life story of two people inparticular, necessitates two actresses to tell us that story. Thewomen, Elizabeth and Gabrielle, are the two big arcs in the playand for various reasons the men are either stopped or denied thatscale of arc. Possibly Joe is the one exception. I think throughthose two women’s stories, we also find something else which isvery very key, I think, to Andrew’s play: they both start with a hugeoptimism and an amazing sense of the possibilities of life, arichness of endeavour, a richness of aspiration. And so what wewatch is the struggle of people who don’t set out to find tragedyin their lives; so we watch seven people fight for, wish for andaspire to their lives to be beautiful and fulfilling and really to beloved. But the conditions of their lives mitigate against this.The moment that fractures all this is Elizabeth’s discovery ofHenry’s sexual deviance, for want of a better term. And what Ithink we find in the play is that this very unnatural act ofpaedophilia breaks something and that is expressed through themetaphor of the rain falling and of nature being upset: thisunnatural act upset something in the natural order as well. It’sreally not until the closing scene when Andrew arrives and breaksthe cycle of separation, denial, and distance, that Henry’sfracturing becomes arguably ‘healed’. Up until that point, I thinkthe future itself has become corrupted.The final quality of the play is the fact that it creates a uniqueworld: it’s not a documentary, it’s not realistic (in the ‘naturalistic’sense of the word at least) so my task, with the help of all thecreative team, is to create a world that develops its own imageryand its own completeness. So as we go through, the audience willbegin to know how to read visual signals, that tell them so much,that actually embody a paragraph or a page of prose, that in thetheatre can just be a moment.From the DirectorAlmeida Projects: When the Rain Stops Falling by Andrew Bovell19
Page 1 and 2: When the Rain StopsFallingby Andrew
Page 3 and 4: When the Rain Stops Fallingby Andre
Page 5 and 6: Henry Law(1938--)Gabriel Law(1938 -
Page 7 and 8: Lisa Dillon and Jonathan CullenPhot
Page 9: Night, waves on the shore and a sto
Page 12 and 13: HENRY LAWJonathan CullenHenry works
Page 14 and 15: DesignThe Almeida Theatre - empty s
Page 16 and 17: Andrew BovellAndrew Bovell wrote th
Page 20 and 21: Michael Attenborough and Phoebe Nic
Page 22 and 23: Naomi Bentley in rehearsalPhoto: Br
Page 24 and 25: The Coorong is a dangerousplace. Ca
Page 26 and 27: The play deals with a number of iss

When the Rain Stops Falling - Almeida Theatre

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