When the Rain Stops Falling
When The Rain Stops Falling, Scott Theatre off Kintore Avenue, Adelaide until March 15 2008; www.adelaidefestival.com.au. Now playing at the Sydney Theatre from May 12, 2009
In our household we talk about something being "a Lantana moment". It's that instant when you suddenly recognise the unexpected and hitherto hidden connections between seemingly unconnected events or people. It's a more accurate measure of life's coincidences than "six degrees of separation" and it's a half-joking homage to Andrew Bovell's Lantana. Precisely: his intricate weaving of apparently disparate characters and events that all meet in the end after complex, subtle plotting that weaves loves, losses, mysteries, crimes and misunderstandings into a narrative of lasting fascination.
Well ring the bells and put out the bunting: Bovell has done it again. When The Rain Stops Falling is his first work for the stage for some years (the allure of movie screenwriting being what it is) and it is everything one might have hoped for and more.
Three years ago Brink Productions brought together the playwright, eminent visual artist Hossein Valamanesh as production designer, composer Quentin Grant, and director Chris Drummond in a project that, according to Bovell, was much influenced by Tim Flannery’s The Future Eaters. Brink's Executive Producer Kay Jamieson who joined the company in 2007 is its proud midwife and the result is a play that is ravishing to look at, is given an extra emotional dimension through the live participation on piano of the composer and has all Bovell’s narrative hallmarks; plus an underpinning of environmental apocalypse that resonates with the human dramas happening within it.
Essentially, over the course of approximately two hours When The Rain Stops Falling follows Gabriel (Neil Pigot), banished from England in the 1960s to the Coorong and thence to Alice Springs by his wife Elizabeth (Michaela Cantwell). At the same tim but nearly 20 years later the audience accompanies his son, also named Gabriel (Yalin Ozucelik) and just seven years old at the time of his father’s disappearance – on his own journey to Australia in search of answers. He doesn’t know what the audience knows, however, because as well as having seen him say goodbye to his bitter, prematurely-aged mother Elizabeth (Carmel Johnson), her relationship with her young husband has already been enacted by her younger self. Are you still with me?
In Australia, separate and synchronous, both Gabriels connect with a young girl, Gabrielle, and her adult self (Anna Lise Phillips). Supposedly peripheral but actually central to Gabrielle’s life is a local Coorong farmer, Joe (Paul Blackwell). Concurrently and together the small incidents and coincidences of their lives combine to dramatically propel the story into the future – 2039 – when climate change seems to have taken a grip on human existence even as an older and sadder Gabrielle (Kris McQuade) is losing her grip on her own.
What happens in the course of the unraveling of these interlinked lives are the usual nothings and catastrophic everythings that constitute “ordinary people” and which make such stories irresistible and gripping. There but for the grace of something or other go any of us is the unexpressed thought and the sense of apocalypse is powerful.
The play is well served by all its creative team, not least a cast of actors whose control and comprehension of the material is breathtaking. Paul Blackwell and Kris McQuade combine in scenes of heartbreaking and hilarious honesty as the long-suffering farmer and his feisty, disappointed wife. Carmel Johnson and Michaela Cantwell bracket the action as the wife and mother whose secrets and pain have shaped her life and the lives of the men she touched. In the main the younger actors inject the youthful light that balances the shadows which envelop their older selves; the glimmers of those shadows being most obvious and moving in the journey of realisation made by the young Gabrielle (Phillips). The final outcome, for those who have undergone the journey with this ordinarily extraordinary bunch, is sad and exhilarating, sobering and unexpectedly comical, bittersweet and unforgettable.
When The Rain Stops Falling is a challenging ride and, after this first production, is likely to undergo a bit of a cut and polish (five or six minutes' worth of false endings could be tidied up, perhaps). That doesn't detract, however, from what already has been achieved. In a festival of high-end imports and spectacular events (see other reviews on StageNoise) this play is, for Australian audiences, probably the most significant work, long-term, because it is unabashed and ambitious theatre and Brink’s plan is that it should travel beyond the Scott Theatre season. When it does, I want to be there.
