A satire on marriage, middle-class success and the notion of life-long friendship, ‘Come Rain or Come Shine’ is a bittersweet farce.
A story about restrained middle-class politeness that shifts seamlessly between scenes of pathos and slapstick, Come Rain or Come Shine is a boutique musical about the passage of time, relationships of convenience and the love of jazz.
Based on the short story by Kazuo Ishiguro, Come Rain or Come Shine features a book by Carolyn Burns and music by Tim Finn and is directed by Simon Phillips. It features an interesting exploration of paper-thin relationships in lifelong friends Ray (Angus Grant) and Charlie (Chris Ryan), who endure each other out of convenience and obligation that the pair confuse as loyalty.
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Beginning in the 1970s, Ray and Charlie’s partner Emily (Gillian Cosgriff) bond over their shared love of jazz, a thread that binds them together throughout their lives. Cleverly demonstrated through costume change, the play whizzes through time, past their graduation to Emily and Charlie’s marriage to their corporate lives in their middle age.
Now an ESL teacher living abroad in Spain, Ray visits the swanky London apartment owned by his old university friends. However, not all is well in the seemingly-perfect middle-class oasis of Charlie and Emily’s home, as Charlie entrusts Ray with the information that their marriage is failing and he’s calling upon his oldest friend to help him out.
The plan? Make Charlie look better in the eyes of Emily by having the happy-go-lucky layabout Ray stay for a week to prove that the man she married doesn’t seem so destitute by comparison.
Photography by Jeff Busby
The premise for the farce invites a lot of interesting dissections of class – Emily and Charlie are openly mean to Ray, mocking him for his layabout, vagabond nature while their own obsession with the corporate rat-race consumes their character, morale and marriage.
An undisputed highlight is the way that the world, quite literally, moves around Ray – he remains timelessly dishevelled, stagnant in the same clothes as his friends transform around him.
Emily’s swishing skirts and a 70s shag haircut are transformed into pencil skirts and an elegant up-do, while Charlie’s long and unruly hair recedes before our eyes and his groovy ensemble of flared pants and paisley shirts are replaced with a business-casual getup. Notably, their ensemble gets greyer as psychedelic patterns transform into monochrome, sensible business attire.
Simultaneously, their 1970s university sharehouse melts away into an upper-middle class London apartment. Dale Ferguson’s set design is an unrivalled highlight of the play, he transforms the world around Ray, Charlie and Emily by way of sliding parts. It works like magic – with sliding panels effortlessly revealing a restaurant, an airport, Emily’s office.
Photography by Jeff Busby
The music is performed live on stage by a three piece band that appears as silhouettes in the windows at the top of the townhouse. Heavily jazz inspired, the original songs are quite catchy – a highlight is a musical number where Ray debates against his own conscience about whether to read Emily’s diary.
Come Rain or Come Shine is a farce undercut by the tragic reality of miscommunication. It’s a funny and bitter-sweet play about characters who appear nice and caring, but write horrible and pointedly cruel things about each other in private diaries, about a marriage that appears successful on the material surface but is marred with bitter distrust. The real tragedy of Come Rain or Come Shine are the truths that are left unsaid, or unsung, at the play’s conclusion.
An MTC Next Stage Original, Come Rain or Come Shine runs until July 23 at Southbank Theatre. Get your tickets by heading here.
