A subtle exploration of the legacy of love
Kate Bassett reviews Three Days of Rain at the Donmar Warehouse

QUEUES for returns are already forming for this clever New York chamber play
by Richard Greenberg, starring Colin Firth, David Morrissey and Elizabeth
McGovern. Robin Lefevre's quietly excellent production was given a fleeting
premiere in March with the same top-calibre cast and its return to the West
End is welcome.

Greenberg's play blends social satire and serious family tensions, sometimes
looking like a knowing cross between Woody Allen and Tennessee Williams, as
the action shunts backwards from the Nineties to 1960.

In the present day, Firth plays a smart-witted but chronically neurotic
thirty-something called Walker. A bit of a Manhattan Hamlet, he did a runner
a year back after the death of his father, Ned, a celebrated architect. But
now, returning to his native soil, Walker intends to deal with his
problematic legacy, and he meets up with his long-suffering sister Nan
(McGovern) and childhood friend and rival Pip (David Morrissey).

Walker and Nan wryly recall their parents' rotten marriage and argue with
Pip about hitherto undisclosed attractions and about who should reside in
their father's most renowned, largely glass home.

Then the action cuts back and, in the same room, we see rivalries and a love
triangle from the past unfold. Firth changes into the desperately shy Ned.
Morrissey resurfaces as Pip's father, Theo, who was Ned's architectural
partner, and McGovern appears as Nan's mother, the ambitious Southern belle,
Lina.

Thus Three Days of Rain is a manifestly tempting showcase for a trio of
flexible actors while, thematically, contemplating processes of inheritance,
the inescapability and elusiveness of the past, and the complexity and
mutability of relationships. We perceive how personal characteristics
resurface, refracted as through a prism, when Firth transforms from the
motor-mouthed, egocentric Walker to the stuttering yet secretly determined
Ned.

Greenberg's script has its weaknesses. There's a long-lost diary, which is a
creaky device, and the play's ending feels rather brusque, like an
unfinished building. But he welds domestic tiffs and poetic monologues
seamlessly and this cast are extremely deft. Morrissey's Pip, a wannabe
smoothie, hovers unsettlingly between patience, fondness and predatoriness.
McGovern is alternately dreamily sweet, steely and canny while Firth treads
a fine line between absurd twitchiness and arresting intensity. And in the
second half, their tentative romance is acutely charming, shot through with
a growing sense of future sadness.

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