When the Rain Stops Falling - Almeida Theatre

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