Sami Ibrahim’s ‘A Sudden Violent Burst of Rain’ is a sloggy allegorical drama about colonialism and refugees that will open the new Gate Theatre when it transfers to London in October. It’s a shame, because at present the cast of three is doubled with that of the far superior ‘Half-Empty Glasses’, which doesn’t appear to be getting a transfer. But them’s the breaks.
The play is set on a soggy, bureaucracy-bound island ruled by a king, that does a roaring trade in wool and takes a dim view of the rights of other countries. In other words, it’s set in a version of Britain, albeit a sort of strange, magical realist one where the wool of the sheep is spun into rainclouds that drift out over the rest of the world.
Elif (Sara Hazemi) is a refugee to those shores, fleeing oppression at home, and has a job shearing sheep and spinning clouds. But she failed to petition the king to become one of his subjects when she arrived and is effectively on the island illegally, working for a local landowner whose son she falls pregnant by. The landowner’s son leaves, and she doesn’t want the landowner to have control of their child, so she moves away to the city and takes a backbreaking job cleaning up the rainwater that sluices through the city’s streets, all the while waiting through the interminable, yearslong process required to become subjects of the king.
Ibrahim’s writing isn’t so much heavy-handed as portentous: the allegorical world he crafts is actually potentially pretty compelling and has a number of sharp ideas. But it’s described in a lumbering, leaden way that just makes its quirks and conceits sound fundamentally uninteresting. The cast is given a lot of third-person narration to do, and it all sounds a bit like a mediocre ‘70s fantasy novel. Ibrahim seems to acknowledge the stifling tone by injecting some lighter moments where the actors break out of character to bicker, but I’d question what this really achieves when there’s so little of it.
Hazemi gives the role of Elif some serious care and gravitas, and she has some wilder, spicier material to get stuck into later on that makes for a livelier final stretch. But for the most part, it’s turgid stuff.
