It Never Rains
Wendy Fisher
Directed by Ralph Bogard
SE Fest 2025, Bridge House Theatre, Penge
Star rating 3.5
Wendy Fisher’s taut new play presents three generation of women within a pretty dysfunctional family. Each has more issues than you can shake a stick at. They struggle to communicate with each other or even to be honest with themselves.
Sarah (Jill Stanford) is just home from a holiday in Spain where her husband has died in the unprecedented heat. Climate change is a theme in this play, which is set firmly in the present, but it isn’t properly developed. Her daughter Anne (Cathy Conneff) arrives to announce that her husband has met someone else and thrown her out penniless. She needs, therefore to stay with her mother for a while although there have clearly always been tension between them. Then Anne’s daughter Mags (Rosa French) who is already married with twin boys turns up and seems, for a while, to be the voice of commonsense until her life too becomes disrupted. They are, as Sarah comments ruefully, “three fuck-ups”.
The situation doesn’t however quite make sense. Anne says she is in her forties and yet she has been married for 30 years. So how old is Mags? Are we too assume that all three of these women were teenage brides? They don’t quite seem the type. It’s not clear.
The tight dialogue which often has ironic undertones pounds along as the three women fall out, become temporarily reconciled, play one off against the other and, gradually uncover or reveal long guarded secrets. There is laughter, angst and anger, the rhythms of which are quite nicely paced.
Stanford seems wooden at the beginning but gradually warms into the role with passion and venom. Her character is a pretty difficult woman. Conneff’s Anne is an inadequate non-coper and she gets the vulnerability combined with an irritating sense of entitlement convincingly. French is strong as the youngest of the three presenting a breezy, no-nonsense young wife and mother, impatient with the irrational behaviour of her mother and grandmother, But it doesn’t last. She is of her generation and wants better than she’s got which leads to weeping, tears and determination to “take her chance.”
I rather liked Farah Ishaq’s video effects which include a window though which, eventually, we experience a thunder storm. The significance of the bathroom and the showers at the end was, however, lost on me.
