Everything points to success here. A play that was a hit a decade ago at the Donmar Warehouse; a smart, likeable trio of actors (James McAvoy, pictured, Lyndsey Marshal, Nigel Harman); a pacy production from Jamie Lloyd; a superb set (Soutra Gilmour) that takes dilapidation to grand heights and offers impressive torrential rain.

Yet this revival of Richard Greenberg’s Manhattan drama rarely rises above the tepid: like the architectural designs that plague one of the characters, it doesn’t fly off the drawing board. The problems reside mostly with the play. It is clever, articulate, insightful and written with brio. Yet there is something too schematic and self-conscious about it: it feels engineered. It doesn’t make you care for the characters. The elliptical first half, intended to be enigmatic, is too often just irritating. Delicately delivered in the intimate Donmar, it worked better; on the West End stage it looks overexposed and the subtleties that could outweigh the smartness get lost.

The structure is certainly ingenious. In the first act, set in 1995, we meet Walker, Nan and Pip. Walker and Nan are siblings, both in their early 30s – he a restless, flaky drifter; she a sensible homemaker. Their architect father died the previous year but they are only now meeting to hear the will. Also in the mix is Pip, son of their father’s business partner. The threey gather in the Manhattan loft, now fallen into dereliction, that their fathers shared in the 1960s. They discover a journal that refers, enigmatically, to “three days of rain”. When the will delivers a shock, Walker attempts to decipher this reference and arrives at a conclusion about the older generation.

But the second act, set in 1960, proves him wrong. The same three actors play the parents, revealing what happened during those crucial “three days of rain” and how the legacy may have affected the children. McAvoy is particularly impressive here as the reserved, stuttering Ned (a welcome contrast to his over-projected Walker in the first half), Marshal striking as a lush Southern belle. Harman fares less well with his underwritten part, but he is very good in the first half as the determinedly upbeat Pip. These are attractive performances but no matter how hard the actors work or how wet they get, they don’t convince you that this is much more than a storm in a teacup.

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