Erstwhile dextrously-written and snappy family drama takes a mid-way veer into melodramatic indulgence – for the worse.
Miranda Lapworth’s Storms, Maybe Snow is built on familiar but time-tested foundations. When we meet them, retired couple Lou and Jack Morley are at a crossroads. They’ve arrived at their seaside home not for a summer sojourn, but for a more permanent beachfront convalescence for Lou in response to a worrying diagnosis. They’re facing up to this new phase of their lives and working out how to chart a course through its destabilising influence on their relationship. Into the picture comes their daughter Mariana (Marnie to her Dad), with whom Lou has a tumultuous relationship, and Marnie’s girlfriend Isobel – a heart-of-gold musician. The coordinates are established for familial turmoil in the face of irrevocable change, all set to the tune of snappy repartee and wistful meditations on life, death, parenthood and marriage.
Considering Storms, Maybe Snow as a whole is something of a challenge, not least because the piece feels almost perfectly cleaved into two discreet sections. The first act is a largely fluid and engaging bourgeois family drama. As played by Jenny Lloyd-Lyons and Neil Sellman (a consistently endearing and intuitive performance), Lou and Jack trade witticisms, quote Tennyson poems (Mariana’s namesake as it happens), and spar with encyclopedia indices courtesy of their frequent rounds of ‘film relay’. Theirs is a marriage now governed by rhythms, habits and, most importantly, rules: which bags of mints are meant for the house, and which for the car; who’s participating in their word-games correctly; who should cook and when. Transpiring against the show’s handsome set, which is genuinely successful in evoking not only the verisimilitudes of a seaside home, but equally the subtle shades of the inhabitants’ contributions to it, it’s a plausible vision of a relationship cresting on its twilight. Lapworth’s dialogue is self-consciously literary, but has an ample sense of rhythm and play – and the cast meet her with their performances, which are spritely in rhythm and responsiveness. That pithy momentum endures with Marnie and Isobel’s appearance for Jack’s birthday, a sequence that retains its sharp ear for conversational musicality.
Problems inhere, without a doubt: the sound design is baffling, with the exact same piece of GarageBand MIDI-Jazz playing no less than three separate times diegetically, and clunky leveling of omnipresent waves/rain sounds that becomes irksome. Inconsistent miming is distracting – some liquids are there, others are not; some food is there, some is invisible. But more crucially, as the Act carries on and the casual domestic banter continues to unspool, the whole endeavour begins to feel more and more thin. The exact coordinates of Lou and Marnie’s relationship are kept needlessly vague; we’re told they despise one another, but it’s hard to divine or observe exactly why, beyond the provision of some airy (if elegantly-put) aphorisms about relationships between mothers and daughters. Any dramatic conflict or agonism in Jack and Lou’s response to the latter’s diagnosis isn’t really fleshed-out, which makes the illness itself begin to feel narratively insubstantial. Chekhovian metaphors and pathetic fallacies proliferate (a neighbour’s boisterous dog on the beach, the titular storms) but they never seem to lead anywhere. We are waiting for the engine to kick in: the subterranean revelations lurking beneath the throb of middle-class domesticity.
And then, right before intermission, the play effectively drives itself off a cliff in a scene so bizarrely paced and organised in its logic that, with reflection, it is nonsensical from any dramaturgical angle. It’s tricky to go into microscopic detail about Storms, Maybe Snow‘s latter half without inadvertently spoiling the play’s narrative detour. But what essentially remains is an extraordinarily protracted 90 minutes of drawn-out trauma exploitation. The dramaturgy almost seems to collapse in on itself, its endless series of lengthy confessional monologues and peculiar soliloquising punctuated by clunky confrontations and awkwardly-rendered spiritual encounters that strain credulity. The breaches in continuity also worsen, and are too profuse to enumerate. Marnie and Isobel come to the fore in this later stretch, and Steph Sarrat and Sarah Cameron-West are fighting for their lives with these scenarios, putting in overtime trying to generate clear intention from the muddle. In Marnie, Sarrat has a particular struggle. Where in the first act she seemed benignly petulant, her filial hectoring here becomes wantonly vicious, with so little substantive provocation that she appears practically psychopathic. It’s all Sarrat (clearly a very capable, deeply-felt performer) can do to make her a baseline sympathetic person, no matter how many tell-us-how-you-feel monologues she’s furnished with.
The two halves are ostensibly connected by a maternal reconciliation arc, but really it feels as though the play just ran out of places to go and decided to tread water for an hour and a half. The threads and teased metaphors that do pay off by the end aren’t sufficiently developed to deliver the cohesion that the play so desperately needs.
I’d struggle to identify more than a few narrative or emotional gestures in the second half of Storms, Maybe Snow that feel truly authentic or earned. It’s a serious misstep, and squanders a good cast and the talents of an articulate, highly literate playwright in the service of melodramatic excess.