EVERY TIME IT RAINS To 4 July.
Hull.
EVERY TIME IT RAINS
by Rupert Creed.
Hull Truck Theatre To 4 July 2009.
Runs 2hr 15min One interval.
Review: Timothy Ramsden 4 July.
Theatre helping a city come to terms with its experience.
Norman and Maureen are happily celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary, inviting round their neighbours, community support officer Claire and her technology-loving, rather immature husband Gary. As Gary takes a photo on Saturday 23 June 2007, it starts raining. And goes on for two days, flooding areas of Hull, driving 20,000 people from homes some of them won’t see again for months.
These characters are composites from writer Rupert Creed’s research into Hull people’s experiences that June weekend. But it’s impossible not to follow them as individuals while watching one marriage split apart and tensions emerge within the other, which had anyway seemed a triumph of hope over similarity in outlook.
But Rocky is real; the policeman who, early in the rainfall, answered an apparently routine call about a man stuck in a drain, arriving to find an emergency as Michael Barnett battled to free his foot from the grid where he’d been attempting to clear the water’s course.
Neither he, Rocky, nor all the king’s horses could manage it, as fast-flowing debris struck divers and the water eventually sucked Barnett under; the sole fatality, to whose memory this production is dedicated.
His death provides two of the play’s strongest moments, the direct testimony of his bereaved father, played with quiet intensity by Martin Barrass, and Rocky’s longer account of guilt-based depression, which Robert Hudson invests with a contained stillness expressing both the exhaustion of depression and the continued self-questioning of guilt. They are forceful as soliloquies; elsewhere the reliance on conversation over action is variably effective.
In contrast, the brief stage images early on where the cast create anonymous Hull motorists hooting impatiently in traffic, showing a city of individual concerns – the fate of family gerbils, a motorist stranded on his car roof to avoid wetting his designer trainers – has a stand-out immediacy. And the later discussion of the fragmentation of services following water privatisation is keenly scrutinised.
National media, it’s claimed, forgot Hull as other areas flooded. Along with other locally-set Truck plays in recent years, Gareth Tudor Price’s production shows this theatre knows how much its city matters.
Norman/Michael Barnett Senior: Martin Barrass.
Gary: Marc Bolton.
Maureen: Christine Cox.
Rocky: Robert Hudson.
Claire: Belinda Lazenby.
Director: Gareth Tudor Price.
Designer/Lighting: Graham Kirk.
Sound: Matthew Thompson.
Composer: Stuart Briner.
Costume: Samantha Robinson.
2009-07-06 15:49:16