Donmar Warehouse, West End, London

Preview 1 March 1999

Runs: 2 - 13 March 1999, 9 November to 22 December 1999, 5 - 22 January 2000

CAST

Colin Firth, Elizabeth McGovern, David Morrissey

REVIEWS

"...Greenberg's Three Days of Rain begins in New York, 1995, and then retreats 30 years. The challenging idea is to demonstrate how biology may give a helping hand to destiny, how the sins or rather our parents' traits and decisions may play shaping parts in our lives... Robin LeFevre's cannily understated production, which I saw at a preview, tantalises with its air of tight-fisted tensions. The concealed truth is about to be forced into the open. When the play concertinas back to 1960s and the two men play their fathers, with Elizabeth McGovern's Nan completing the emotional triangle as her own mother, you come to understand how the sexual and emotional patterns of the next generation have been set. The force of Colin Firth's remarkable acting transcends the mere erotic appeal that on television made him the fantasy play-thing of so many women. He portrays two men who loiter on the fringes of life, brooding over how to find the key to happiness. Firth's valiantly worn dejection always rings true. Dowdily dressed in despondency, an almost thread-bare charm and a long, grey-green pull-over as Walker, and then in the role of his bespectacled, stammering and introverted father, the less brilliant architect, Firth illuminates both men's diffidence and pain. Miss McGovern wears a vibrant sexiness, but remains enigmatically buttoned up. David Morrissey's Pip most powerfully shows how we may speak the most painful home truths in the mildest tones." The London Evening Standard

"...[Colin Firth] is terrific in this modest but civilised new American play, the final offering in a showcase of new Stateside writing at the adventurous Donmar. Richard Greenberg's drama is one of those time warp jobbies. It starts in 1995 when a brother, Firth, and sister, Elizabeth McGovern, inherit from their late, monosyllabic architect father a world famous house on Long Island. Actually, it's their friend Pip, David Morrissey, who gets the house. He's the son of the father's partner. But it's all OK. The trio bicker, chide, chew the cud and get on amicably enough with the business of tying up the estate. In the second half, a nice touch this, the three play their respective parents back in 1960 - cue some jazz, a lot of smokes and some seriously dodgy clothes. The lovely Miss McGovern, twinkling with a sensual charm, now plays her mother as a young woman who semi-seduced her shy stuttering father whose silence - far from being empty, it turns out - conceals a passion and mistaken talent. The title? Well, those three days of rain baldly recorded in the young architect's diary have a romantic significance unguessed at by his grouchy, elusive son in the first half. Morrissey, incidentally, is superbly genial in the first half as the happy-go-lucky TV actor who complains that if you go about in a genuine good mood people will tend to think you're stupid. I suppose this is the theatre equivalent of chamber music. There's not much resolution, no car chases, just a nice, romantic dinner a deux. But the evening comes with a sense of hidden personality and a nice line in wit. Unobtrusively directed by Robin Lefevre, it's a pleasure to see three actors inhabit an enjoyable new play with competence, calm and grace." The Express

"Three Days of Rain introduces a very clever, if rather dry and schematic young dramatist called Richard Greenberg. And we do him proud. Colin Firth, Elizabeth McGovern and David Morrissey add flesh and passion to two overlapping triangular love stories in New York. First, 1995: a brother and sister of a lately dead architect pick over what happened, the legacy, the house that must be lived in. The son of the architect's partner, a TV actor who eats chocolate and doesn't put on weight, reveals his affair with the architect's daughter. Cut backwards, after the interval, to 1960. The same three actors play the two architects and the girl who left one for the other in three days of rain: wet, wet, wet. Lucidity of writing and the pointed, precise playing in Robin Lefevre's smart production on a pristine white setting brings us all together. The emotional switch is beautifully handled. Miss McGovern is stunning as a calculating Southern belle whose weakness for drink parallels that of her daughter, while Firth heads backwards from nerdy inheritor to stuttering, awakening artist of the drawing board. And the wonderful Morrissey redefines his Nineties nerve as Sixties cool, finally left out in the rain, like the cake in the pop song. It is heartening to hear good writing emerging from off-Broadway again. I just wonder, though, if these triangular, interconnecting designs for living win carry too parochial, or dare one say pointless, a punch." The Daily Mail

"...Most people's diary entries degenerate to weather reports. When Walker (Colin Firth) discovers his late father's secret journal, he and his sister Nan (Elizabeth McGovern) are disappointed to see that the very first entry is shockingly bland: "Three days of rain". For the siblings, this comes as something of an end, but for the playwright Richard Greenberg it is a cunningly constructed beginning. This, the last in the Donmar's American season, is an often fascinating study of the legacy of two architects whose family home is a world-renowned landmark and the centre of an emotional whirlpool for their children. The sibling rivalries of the well-layered characters are deftly established as Nan meets up with neurotic Walker for the reading of the will... The director, Robin Lefevre, coaxes witty, beautifully modulated performances from his cast, all of whom resist the temptation to signal too heavily what we know of their older selves. The rivalry between the men is captivatingly done and the climactic seduction scene is exquisitely played by a wonderfully gauche, stammering Firth - all spectacles and hunched shoulders - and febrile, skittish McGovern - a headstrong cross between a young Katharine Hepburn and early Blanche Dubois - yet even they cannot stave off the curiously flat denouement. The gap between what we thought we knew and the lite