When It Rains

Canadian humour’s reputation for impenetrability is confirmed in the unsettling, half-comic momentum of this “live-action existential graphic novel” by Nova Scotian touring company 2b. Two ordinary married couples inhabit projected rooms, the emptiness of their existences outlined in Nick Bottomley’s ingeniously bleak 24-bit projected backdrop.

A stylish opener anatomises the characters with well-timed spotlights and corresponding one-liners, delivered by robotic voiceover. But the sitcommy tone it establishes is faltering. Whereas other writers are content to poke at the miserable uncertainty of the human condition, playwright Anthony Black’s boldly rugby tackles the question down in a series of bizarre reversals of fate and cod-philosophical tête-à-têtes.

Louis is a French professor, and hence especially prone to these musings. But he’s also enough of a stereotype that his alibi for his infidelities is to tell his wife Anna (Samantha Wilson) that “I went to eat a crepe. Eet was sheet.” She sees through his ingenious deception, and he experiments with hedonism and homelessness. Meanwhile, she tries adopting the dubious habits of yoga and soy milk consumption to fill her existential void. Black plays her brother Alan as a souless cipher – a maths genius banker who loses millions by filling in too many zeros. And his wife Sybil (Francine Deschapper) is—of course—utterly free of the prophetic powers to foresee her bleak downfall.

The vast screen continually torments and mocks the characters in front of it, with typed phrases spelling out their failings and signposting their downfalls. But, cruel as its ironies are, these thin archetypes would be even more lost without it.

 

https://www.pleasance.co.uk/event/when-it-rains