A contemporary classic of Australian theatre, When the Rain Stops Falling has been staged numerous times since its 2008 premiere, including in London and New York. Andrew Bovell’s drama, about trauma being handed along four generations, has surely become even more powerful since it was named best new play of the year by Time magazine.

Its human drama is subtly couched within the metaphor of global environmental destruction – another kind of trauma passed from generation to generation. Through the past 15 years of drought, flood, bushfires and storms, we have become even more conscious that what we do, or fail to do now and in the past, has disastrous consequences for the future.

This heightens the sense that the actions and inaction of the play’s absent fathers and withdrawn mothers have consequences. They produce troubled children whose understanding of family history is fragmentary. As is the audience’s for much of the play, but gradually pieces of the complex intergenerational puzzle fall into place.

Esther Van Doornum and Francis Greenslade in Iron Lung Theatre’s When the Rain Stops Falling. Photo © Lachlan Woods.

The narrative slips back and forth in time: we...