This smart family drama takes as its title the old saw ‘It never rains but it pours’ to introduce us to a world where climate change has devastating impacts on a suburban home. It opens with a news report on heatwaves which will reflect the heated rows of three generations of women in the same family.
Sarah arrives back from holiday with her wheely trolley and a Bag for Life to her unaccustomedly messy home with plates and clothes on the floor and furniture. The first surprise is that in the bag is her husband of 40 years who died of heatstroke and was cremated abroad.
The household mess is the responsibility of her daughter, Anne, whose marriage has broken up and she has come back to crash at mum’s place.  Welcome to the world of boomerang children who never seem to leave the parental home for long, supplemented in this case by a boomerang grandchild.
Without grandad’s calming presence, the women in his life say what they really think about each other – and him.
Acid-tongued grandma, played with stoical fierceness by Jill Stanford, asks her daughter ‘Haven’t you got a friend you can stay with?’ she has been looking forward to enjoying her widowhood. She explains she really wanted a bright child she could feel proud of; she expects her daughter to stand on her own two feet, or as she puts it: ‘Shoulders back. Puppies out. Get on with it.’
The whiney daughter, played by Cathy Conneff, is acting like the teenager she always reverts to in her mother’s house. She has been hard done by, but as the play asks, how much can we blame our parents for everything that happens to us?
The sparring between these two is mediated by sparky granddaughter Mags, played by Rosa French, it is child tantrums verses control freak as she points out. Her close relationship with Sarah neatly shows how affection can skip a generation.
Mags presents as capable but in fact she is no better adjusted to life than her mother and grandmother, she is just better able to manage situations, thanks to the A level in psychology of which she is inordinately proud.
The writing from Wendy Fisher is sharp with well observed humour and a clear eye for the manoeuvres used in toxic relationships. Thus confidences given in the occasional moments of tenderness between the women are weaponised and used in anger to shame the confidante later on.
This is a well worked out classical tragedy in that all the damage has already been done: what we see is the result of cruelty over decades – even a century, as we glimpse a picture of the monstrous matriarch who was Anne’s mother, who is at one point blamed as the source of all the transmitted pain.
The play shows the effect of international changes in the living room of an ordinary family. The desperate heat throughout most of the play is the most obvious but there is also redundancy because of digitisation. No one on stage is joining up the dots (that’s the audience’s job), but even if they did, they are powerless to change anything.
Playwright: Wendy Fisher
Director: Ralph Bogard
Cast: Jill Stanford, Cathy Conneff, Rosa French
Duration: 90 minutes, no interval
Until: 3 September 2025