ajhlovestheatre

THE WIND AND THE RAIN

by Merton Hodge

Directed by Geoffrey Beevers

Finborough Theatre, London – until 5 August 2023

https://finboroughtheatre.co.uk

The Finborough’s house policy of programming interesting neglected plays of yesteryear alongside their regular roster of new writing and UK premieres is an admirable one. It has thrown up several treats over the years (2013’s London Wall got a West End transfer and last year’s female-driven Scottish costume drama The Straw Chair was an enchanting rediscovery) but, my goodness, the wheels have come off with this tedious disinterment.

Merton Hodge’s The Wind And The Rain (the title is taken from Feste’s song in Twelfth Night, quoted in the text) was a major popular hit in the 1930s, clocking up over a thousand performances in the West End, six months on Broadway and becoming a staple of repertory theatres up and down the land. However, tastes change, attention spans shrink, hope withers and the will to live can get lost: watching The Wind And The Rain in 2023, in it’s first staging in eighty years, it is pretty hard to see what the appeal was.

Set entirely in the study of an Edinburgh students boarding house, overseen by the dour but not unkind landlady Mrs McFie (played with exactly the right level of grimly unsmiling fortitude by Jenny Lee), the play centres on trainee doctor Charles Tritton (Joe Pitts) whose initial plan to get back to London and his needy mother and on-off sweetheart as soon as possible, is scuppered when he meets New Zealand sculptor Anne (Naomi Preston-Low). Charles and Anne are terribly dull company however, and his fellow student lodgers are not so much characters as non sequiturs made flesh.

There’s a lot of mind-bendingly inconsequential chatter, no action to speak of and Charles spends an eye-rolling amount of time bellowing into the telephone at the corner of the set, presumably to ensure that everyone in the audience is clued up on what little plot developments there are. It’s all a colossal bore, despite the efforts of a game young cast to breathe life into it…. and what’s worse, it lasts nearly three hours including the interval.

Clearly Hodge couldn’t construct a plot like his contemporaries Priestley and Somerset Maugham, but neither could he at least create words for audiences to luxuriate in, à la Coward. The language in The Wind And The Rain is colourless and flaccid, rarely elevating to anything approaching wit, and the very brief suggestion of bisexuality (which the advertising blurb makes mention of, thereby making one wonder if the Trade Descriptions Act needs invoking) is suggested with a quick hand on the shoulder: this is hardly Design For Living.

Geoffrey Beevers’s stolid production isn’t helped by the fact that few of the younger members of cast, while enjoyably vital even when their script isn’t, seem to be able to capture the period style. A notable exception is Helen Reuben as Tritton’s London girlfriend, a perennially tipsy, glamorous flapperish type with a rich inner life, a tartly shrill giggle, an intriguingly ambiguous attitude, and a bit of a temper; she’s quite wonderful and lights up the stage whenever she’s on.

Carla Evans provides a warmly observed, richly detailed set and Edward Lewis’s evocative sound designs (everything from period music, offstage cacophony and apparently never-ending Edinburgh rain) is a valuable component in what appeal the show actually has. Writer Hodge’s “day job” was as an anaesthetist in a London hospital and it’s tempting to imagine that he put some of his patients out by reading sections of this play to them.