Director Chris Baldock has been wanting to stage Andrew Bovell’s play, When The Rain Stops Falling, for 10 years and this fourth time around, it looks as if he’ll pull it off, says arts editor HELEN MUSA.

Andrew Bovell is one of Australia’s best-known playwrights for his plays, his screenwriting – think Lantana – and for his stage adaptation of The Secret River.

“At first I couldn’t get the rights for this play[When The Rain Stops Falling],” director Chris Baldock tells me.

“I even thought of doing the play in Yarralumla Woolshed, but it was too cold… a bloody brilliant play, it gives us a sense of history and its consequences, of how our actions reverb into the future.”

He very nearly staged it in March 2022 as the premiere production of ACT Hub in Kingston but then the show was mysteriously cancelled at the last minute.

Bovell’s multi-generational opus, widely touted as The Great Australian Play, grew out of an unusual cross-genre collaboration and commission between Bovell, Adelaide director Chris Drummond and designer the late Hossein Valamanesh. 

It blew the minds of Canberra audiences when it toured to The Playhouse in 2010 and is likely to do the same at Belco.

Winner of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award, the Victorian Green Room Award and the Sydney Theatre Award for Best New Australian Work, the script, played by three men and four women, begins famously in 2039, when a fish falls from the sky, then proceeds through the interconnected stories of two families over four generations, starting in London in 1959 and ending in Australia 80 years later.

Baldock has been working hard with this chosen cast of nine actors, which includes himself playing Gabriel York senior. 

“Anybody I direct has to have heart,” he says, assuring me that they all do.

“This play is in my body and my heart, because I’ve been wanting to do it for so long.”

With Baldock are actors Jessica Beange and Liz St Clair Long.

St Clair Long plays the older Elizabeth Law and tells me how her character has forgotten how to love, how she may be alcoholic and how she sets up the play’s big mystery when she refuses to tell her son Gabriel Law why his father Henry Law (Zac Bridgman) left them when the son was just seven. You can see that it gets complicated here. 

“But it won’t be hard for the audience to follow,” Baldock says.

“The beginning of the play poses a kind of a puzzle, a mystery but then the pieces start falling into place and audiences should find the mystery element fascinating.

“Besides, because of TV, people nowadays are used to non-linear storytelling.”

Although Elizabeth senior never meets her younger self, played by Ruth Hudson, we do find out what happened to Henry, although Beange and St Clair Long say we’ll have to stay the course to see how the parts fit together. 

Bovell has deliberately made it tricky, Beange points out. For instance, there are two Gabriels and the second one has a child with a roadhouse waitress named Gabrielle – that’s the part she plays.

There’s some doubling of characters, precisely specified by Bovell, something that they hope adds to the theatricality.

Most of Bovell’s plays have been done under a conventional proscenium arch, but in Belco, it will be staged in-the-round.

“I wanted it to be really immersive… most people are on stage all the time,” Baldock says. 

Great Australian play it may be, but to Baldock what is most fascinating is how it resonates on a simple human level. 

“Bovell is an intellectual, but he has done it with real heart,” he says.

“And one of the terrific things about him as a playwright is that he knows how to write a decent long scene.”

When The Rain Stops Falling, Belconnen Arts Centre, May 8-17.