I'm quite drawn to fragmentary things. Jennifer Egan's 'A Visit from the Goon Squad', for example, is up there as one of my favourite novels of the last decade. I'm a huge fan of the fleeting, episodic writing of Bret Easton Ellis, too. There's something appealing about peering at a snapshot of a character, getting a sense of them and their story, and moving onto to someone or something else. 

Curious Directive's 'After the Rainfall' is a patchwork of historical moments, skipping around between the years 1952, 1986, 2012 and 2022. The lives of Edward and Ishak (flying over the Egyptian dessert with a precious cargo), Claire (an art student in Cumbria), Rashida (a young, tech-savvy woman on a pilgrimage to see the Rosetta stone), John and Grace (an author and a geologist) all have a thematic connection and, as their stories advance, become historically bound to one another.

There's not a weak link in the 85 minute piece, with each actor inhabiting the well-crafted depth of their character. The choreography is excellent and each movement seems rehearsed and perfected down to the minutest detail. The result is a smooth and seamless experience. Strange to say, perhaps, but we're entirely undistracted by the production's frills, allowing us to be immersed in the stories. 

And stories, after all, are what drive the play. Anthropological ideas creep about in the piece and, once or twice, threaten to choke the relationships we're being sold. The central conceit - essentially, a disagreement over a book which compares human behaviour to that of an ant colony - wears thin quite quickly.

The science and the comparison itself is fascinating and well-realised. But the author's defense of the book (in news interviews and with his now estranged girlfriend) descends into tedious navel-gazing territory and we're glad to be out of his company as often as we are. 

I'm sure everyone will take away a different experience from the play but, in particular, I was drawn to the Cumbrian art student's tale. Having lost her brother in a mining accident, she sets out to create a piece of art which pays tribute to him and the mining community. There's something gentle and honest in her relationship with her new boyfriend and a sort of catharsis descends when she unveils her work towards the end of the play.  

I think that a good ten minutes could be lost from the production as, at the crucial seventy-minute mark, I was starting to get a little restless. But there's an awful lot to like and admire in 'After the Rainfall'. I'm still considering the story-lines now; how they connect and what their resolutions are. It's a play whose strength lies in its fragmentary parts. We're absorbed by the brief moments as they happen. The ability to produce four thoroughly engaging, lingering tales is a testament Curious Directive's enduring love of storytelling. 

I saw this play a few weeks ago, and just thought I'd give you an overview of my thoughts on it.

This is an interesting piece that serves as a good introduction to people who haven’t seen much or any physical theatre before.  

Spanning over 150 years, the story unfolds in the Norwegian mountains beloved by the Sami, where the cold conditions have both killed and saved people, and follows the stories of four people, a Victorian cartographer who was sent out to chart the mountains, Frieja who goes out to Norway to spread the ashes of her deceased father, Anna who is trapped under the ice for 40 minutes, and a man pioneering a new, life-saving technique discovered because of Anna’s accident.

The piece is visually striking as the completely white set is a stark reminder of the landscape that binds all the story lines together, and gives for a stunning contrast against the performers and the coloured wool used to represent the lines and shapes as plotted by the cartographer.