Three Days of Rain
Apollo
This Isn’t Romance
Soho
Richly sophisticated and over-contrived. This is the glory and the failing of Richard Greenberg’s Three Days of Rain. But, first, hats off to a writer who expects his audience to be smart, clued-in and intellectually curious. Dimwits, stay in the bar, we’ll join you later. The play opens in a disused office space in 1995 where three young adults who grew up together are tussling over their dead father’s will. Dad ran a hugely successful architectural practice and the plot turns on the ownership of an award-winning, postmodern house, built in the early Sixties, whose innovative design launched the careers of its creators but whose true authorship is in doubt. Believe me, weaving these intractable themes into a play is extremely tricky. Making them plausible, interesting and narratively dynamic is trickier still. And in that sense the play’s first act is a wonder. Greenburg’s passion for architecture is matched by his eloquence. The passages in which the characters debate the particular qualities of light and space that make one building poetic and another banal will bear many repetitions.
Alas, the play trips up on its structural ambitions. The second act scrolls back 35 years and we watch the parents of the first-act characters working through a torrid and treacherous love-triangle. Because these sequences lack the suspense and wit of the first act, the result is imbalance, anticlimax and a sense of incompleteness: the play ends, weirdly, three decades before it began. The company play two characters each, which is highly satisfying for them, less so for us. That rather chilly young stud, James McAvoy, does OK here. First he’s a hysterical preppie jerk and later a silent and stammering young genius.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in