REVIEW: A Steady Rain - Aparo Theatre, PIP Theatre

A Steady Rain

Presented by Aparo Theatre in co-production with PIP Theatre

Written by Keith Huff

Directed by Megan Hind

Set and Costume Designer: Stefan Cooper-Fox

Fight and Intimacy Co-ordinator: NJ Price

Accent Coach: Helen Howard

Photography: Creative Street / Kris Anderson - Images by Anderson / Pip Suschinsky

“We should know the eyes of a demon when we see one.”

Presented by Aparo Theatre in co-production with PIP Theatre, Keith Huff’s A Steady Rain is an intense buddy-cop play about loyalty, corruption, guilt, and the difficult decisions that keep narrowing until no good options remain. Directed by Megan Hind, the production starred Matthew Filkins as Denny and Zac Boulton as Joey, two Chicago cops recounting their versions of events to Internal Affairs after a bullet was fired through the front window of Denny’s family home. The play gained widespread attention after opening on Broadway in 2009, starring Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig. It explores a friendship built on brotherhood, dependency, damage, and denial, where loyalty becomes harder and harder to separate from self-preservation.

A gritty buddy-cop tragedy is not generally the thing I run towards with open arms and my trusty pink notebook. But this production had me properly gripped. The writing moved at a cracking pace, the performances were intense, and the story unfolded like a puzzle being revealed piece by piece. Just when I thought I had figured out where it was going, another shocking piece fell into place. I lost track of how many life-ruining decisions were made per minute.

Upon entering the studio theatre, we found Filkins and Boulton already onstage, situated in what resembled an interrogation room. Stefan Cooper-Fox set design was sparse: a white corner space, two chairs, fluorescent lights overhead, and a clock. Not exactly a room you’d want to be invited into for a friendly chat. Without theatrical clutter, there was nowhere for these performers to hide, and the emphasis sat firmly on the storytelling. And for a play centred on memory, confession, contradiction, and self-justification, this was precisely the right focus.

Denny, played by Matthew Filkins, was the so-called family man, though mainly in the technical sense that he had a wife and two boys. I found his character to be loud, impulsive, foul-mouthed, prejudiced, violent, and constantly rationalising his awful behaviour as a means of protecting his family. Filkins gave him a frightening momentum. Denny was perpetually on the verge of exploding (and often did). Yet Filkins made sure we saw his fear underneath the rage, especially when Denny recounted his two-year-old son being injured by glass shrapnel after the gunshot shattered the window. It was a classic action-movie “family threatened, man leaps into action” moment, but with messy and painful repercussions.

Filkins’ soliloquies were utterly vivid. When Denny spoke about his infidelity, his altercations with pimps, his enemies on the street, and the tangled mess of people orbiting his life, I could picture it all with uncomfortable clarity. Sometimes more clarity than I particularly wanted in my mind’s eye, which was probably the point. He painted the world of the play so powerfully that the invisible characters — Connie, Rhonda, the children, the criminals, the victims — all seemed to occupy the room with them.

Zac Boulton brought a very different weight as Joey. Joey was Denny’s longtime partner, his oldest friend, and a man with his own battle with alcohol, but he was also the one trying to hold the crumbling pieces together. Boulton gave Joey a haunted restraint that balanced Denny’s volatility. He was softer, but not weak; damaged, but not passive. His descriptions of Connie revealed so much: Joey was clearly enamoured with her and seemed capable of offering the care and stability that Denny lacked.

The interaction between the two performers shared a brotherly rhythm: quick to interrupt, quick to defend, quick to wound, and all too accustomed to compensating for one another. A particularly telling line was, “I’d been covering for him for so long, I couldn’t keep the lies straight.” Their bond was so deep that it had turned into a trap. And the underlying physical tension between the men was always palpable. Both actors handled a huge amount of dialogue with impressive skill. The pace was fast, the Chicago accents consistent, and neither performer seemed to falter, despite the sheer volume of text! Filkins’ anger and Boulton’s trauma were both intensely convincing, and together they carried the 90 minutes with stamina. I just know that both actors must have needed about five litres of water afterwards!

The play effectively used perspective by presenting both sides of the story, revealing shifting truths based on the speaker’s intentions and omissions. This was especially apparent in the incident with a young Vietnamese boy discovered naked and distressed in an alley. Unable to communicate with him, the officers couldn’t determine whether he was high, traumatised, dangerous, harmless, or something else entirely. As one line put it, “99% of the f*ckin’ city is traumatised.” The scene highlighted issues of language barriers, assumptions, policing, who is believed when the full picture is unclear, and who is culpable when darkness is brought to light.

Megan Hind’s direction kept the production tight. The play began right in the middle of the action and barely gave us a chance to settle. The pacing worked especially well for me because there was no room to drift. We were drip-fed information, then forced to re-evaluate it. A gunshot through a window led to a revenge mission, which led to broken protocols, job suspensions, car chases, violence, infidelity, guilt, and eventually, avoidable deaths.

As the title suggests, the physical and metaphorical rain fell relentlessly throughout the story, sitting underneath the action as a dark, inescapable backdrop. The gunshots were loud and realistic, so consider that a warning for anyone sensitive to sudden sound. There were no props, yet the miming was precise enough that I never felt like anything was missing. Every drink, weapon, injury, stressful car ride, and violent encounter was conjured through performance alone. The fight and intimacy coordination by NJ Price played a crucial role, especially for a production where the action unfolded through memories rather than direct staging.

This was not an easy watch, and nor should it have been. It asked uncomfortable questions about loyalty, masculinity, corruption, and the stories people tell so they can live with themselves. “It’s strange the things you have to lose in order to gain what you want” sat heavily over the final stretch of the play. By the end, I had reacted viscerally more than once, which indicates that a play has managed to get under my skin.

Aparo Theatre and PIP Theatre delivered a stripped-back, hard-hitting production. It was tense, confronting theatre, and a reminder that sometimes the most unsettling storms are the ones people try to explain away.