Writer: Merton Hodge
Director: Geoffrey Beevers
Merton Hodge’s The Wind and the Rain was a huge international hit in the 1930s and became a staple of repertory companies. This production directed by Geoffrey Beevers at the Finborough Theatre is the first professional London production for over 80 years.
The inevitable question is, does it stand the test of time?
It’s clear from the well-designed, ultra-realistic set by Carla Evans that there are unlikely to be any theatrical surprises. We’re in the sitting room of a group of young medical students and fellow lodgers and we are destined to remain here for five years, from Charles Tritton’s arrival to his qualifying as a doctor. We’re in Edinburgh, although you wouldn’t know it, except for the presence of comedy Scottish landlady, Mrs McFie (drolly performed by Jenny Lee), and the overworked joke of Scotland’s constant rain.
The posh young men engage in lots of heavy-handed banter, joshing one another about girls and forever going out to dinner and dances. Cheeky Gilbert Raymond (Mark Lawrence) may boast of his casual affairs, but in truth no one ever seems to acquire a partner of any kind. Earnest Charles (Joe Pitts) alone stays at home to study and it is he who gets the girl. He arrives from London with a framed photograph of Jill (Helen Reuben), the young woman, approved of by his mother, with whom he has just come to ‘an understanding’.
In Edinburgh he meets and falls in love with young New Zealand sculptor, Anne Hargreaves (Naomi Preston-Low), but seems to lack the courage either to propose to Anne or to break things off with Jill. And that’s the long and short of it. Despite the length of the play, which has a running time of over two-and-a-half hours, nothing much happens. We are encouraged to see the arrival of the results of the final exams as one of the most dramatic moments in the play.
It’s really hard to see what appeal The Wind and the Rain has for an audience today. It’s clearly heavily autobiographical – New Zealander Hodge trained as a medical student in Edinburgh in the period. And there is potential interest, hinted at in the publicity, that it is informed by the writer’s own experience as bisexual. But Hodge’s relentless naturalism makes it very hard for a director to find any possible queer subtext. Clearly, Charles is unhappy in his own skin and although he is well up on Freud and sexual repression, there is no erotic spark between him and either of his girlfriends. But there is no scope for showing a shadow side.
Perhaps we shouldn’t expect a play of the early 1930s to foreground sexual relationships. But this is the era of Noël Coward and by the time of The Wind and the Rain, audiences had thrilled to his often risqué plays from The Vortex (1924) to Private Lives (1930). The Wind and the Rain is tame in comparison.
One of the problems for Hodge is that his determination to be realistic causes technical problems with the writing. For one, he is forced to write dialogue which sounds as if the characters rarely talk to one another over the years. Anne, for example, who has been involved with Charles for some years, suddenly decides to tell him ‘Mother and I don’t get along,’ as if somehow they’d never discussed their family relationships before. And the character of Jill, albeit nicely played by Reuben, is so frankly absurd as a shallow vamp that Charles’ tortured deliberations about her make no sense. Another worrying aspect is that Charles, despite five years of medical training, is unable to understand what is killing his mother – reporting only that she has a twisted something or other.
Not a play for our time
Runs until 5 August 2023
