WHEN THE RAIN STOPS FALLING WINS SECOND LITERARY AWARD

The 2008 Queensland Premier's Literary Awards have been announced with Andrew Bovell's When The Rain Stops Falling winning the Drama Script (Stage) Award.  See the judges comments below"

"This elegant, beautifully crafted play strikes a rare balance between plotting a path through a complex mystery and using poetic means to do it. What results seems part theatre, part music, and part architecture. Through a sequence of settings that merge like variations on a theme we travel backwards and forwards in time, drawing more texture and story to the centre each time, tightening the knot that begins to slowly form around the necks of the key characters, closing in on the truth, without losing track or traction. Through a kind of gestural repetition fragment after fragment emerges and the story haltingly unfolds. We gradually learn that this family has been torn apart but by unknown forces. We unearth an abducted child, abuse, a father who disappeared long ago, and all that pain. And yet they persist, meeting in and out of time to eat together, to talk, to just be together. Also, another depth that may well be new in world theatre lies behind and under this play. The writer has used the changed world climate of the future itself as a poetic framework, without question and without urgency, as unquestioned as climate has always been to the species until now, a return to an ancient faith. The pace of the work is such that everything, even each character, seems to be stunned by the inevitability of it all. What is left to them is to keep on within this routine that changes without entirely changing. Ultimately this is a play that is not simply about grief - it embodies grief, carried in the incessant rain."