Edinburgh 2022: Review: A SUDDEN VIOLENT BURST OF RAIN, Summerhall Roundhouse

The Paines Plough Roundhouse stage is a gorgeous space. Brutally raw, it can grant performers the power to garner powerful emotional warmth through its cosy intimacy. But as capable as it is of generating great theatre, it is also capable of the opposite. A Sudden Violent Burst of Rain is an example of the latter, more stifled than supported by the space it is performed in.

But the problems with the space are symptomatic of a wider issue in A Sudden Violent Burst of Rain. The writing draws on a plethora of ideas and concepts tied to the immigrant experience, but the result is too diffuse for something overtly political.

Writer Sami Ibrahim keeps things deliberately vague to attempt to paint a tableaux of a universal immigrant story, some kind of morality table or fairy-tale. The idea is that its world and ethnically ambiguous characters could exist at any point in time. But in stripping itself of detail he defangs its bite. As a result the play's focus is cloudy, its voice unclear, and its edge blunted.

Brecht is an interesting touchpoint for A Sudden Violent Burst of Rain. Both the staging and the story are indebted to the German playwright with the plotline being particularly reticent of The Caucasian Chalk Circle. Both follow a single mother traversing an unforgiving world populated by pen-pushing bureaucrats and supercilious landowners. The latter adds a pinch of magical realist garnish and crass humour; at one point flying sheep become clouds which inexplicably rain faeces down on a city below.

But while Brecht's political focus is sharp and his writing snarls and slices at those watching, here the large narrative scope is carried by clunky exposition which makes for a bloodless staging with awkward direction.

Everything feels rushed to accommodate the numerous characters and scenes at the opportunity cost of allowing the audience and the performers to breathe. That is precisely why the play struggles in the Roundhouse. Whilst the three performers do an admirable job of covering the many characters through multi-rolling, they are never given the time to walk in their shoes.

Consequently, the world and its inhabitants of A Sudden Violent Burst of Rain are never fleshed out, something exacerbated when the space is so artistically democratic. The audience have been invited into this world, but there is nothing there. The space is emotionally cold, dominated by the bland storytelling and predictable action.

A Sudden Violent Burst of Rain plays at the Roundhouse in Summerhall until 27 Aug 2022 and then on tour.

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