Theatre review: The Wind and the Rain

If the Finborough Theatre still exists in 90 years' time (still somehow based in an inaccessible room that people are constantly trying to evict them from, above a pub that's due to have gone bankrupt another 18 times by then,) I imagine they'll be staging 2:22 A Ghost Story, with a blurb marvelling at the fact that it played half the theatres in the West End with a rotating cast of random women with big Instagram followings. That (minus the Instagram part) seems to have been the story of The Wind and the Rain in 1933, with Merton Hodge's semi-autobiographical play about his student days also fitting in a successful Broadway run before vanishing without trace. In other words it's a textbook Finborough rediscovery, and one that, while amiable enough, left me trying to pick apart exactly what could have made it so popular.

Charles (Joe Pitts) arrives in Edinburgh, still the centre of medical knowledge, to begin his five years' training as a doctor - although as one of his new flatmates, Gilbert can attest to, it might take a lot longer than that.

Gilbert (Mark Lawrence) is about to start the third year of his course - it's taken him four years to get that far, but in fairness he does eschew studying on favour of going out every night to pick up women. John (Harvey Cole) is more concerned with not needing his own medical help by staying fit with the 1930s equivalent of a hardcore gym session (aka a regular round of golf,) and they're all fussed over in grudging fashion by dour housekeeper Mrs McFie (Jenny Lee.)

This is Charles' first real time away from his controlling mother, who's always wanted him to marry family friend Jill, and he's always sort of assumed he will. But the action takes place over the five years, and by the time Jill (Helen Reuben) finally visits she's got the brash Roger (Lynton Appleton, the result of a successful project to clone Toby Stephens) in tow, possibly to make Charles jealous. So she's unprepared to walk in on him with New Zealander Anne (Naomi Preston-Low,) whom he's fallen for in the meantime, and end up the one feeling cheated on.

The Wind and the Rain - named not just for the Scottish weather that greets the students back every year, but also the song from Twelfth Night that Charles and Anne first bond over - is gently amusing enough, and Pitts confidently leads an entertaining cast with his likeably low-key conflict over how to follow his heart. (Geoffrey Beevers' production goes on the theory that the dilemma is queercoded around Hodge's bisexuality, so it hints at sexual tension between Charles and David Furlong's Dr Duhamel as well.)

My seat neighbour asked me in the interval where I thought the story was going and I said I didn't think it was really going anywhere, and certainly in terms of any big dramatic events happening onstage I was right: This really is just about gently leading Charles to both figure out what he actually wants, and go for it. It does try the patience in the end - we get to the day of final exams surprisingly quickly, followed by an entire act of Multiple Ending Syndrome as Hodge can't quite let go of his characters and starts to throw plot developments and twists in Charles' way before he can finally figure himself out.

So I did end up wondering what it was that made this likeable but unexceptional play such a hit in its day: If it is even queercoded it's subtly enough that I can't see it causing a huge scandal, although there's very little doubt left over what Gilbert's doing on his "dates" with half the women of Edinburgh so perhaps there was a hint of shock value there. Not quite consistently funny enough to call a comedy, not quite sharp enough for a drama, apart from overstaying its welcome there's not a huge deal the play is doing wrong, but it's hard to see what, even 90 years ago, it did so right.

The Wind and the Rain by Merton Hodge is booking until the 5th of August at the Finborough Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Mark Senior.