The Deep Blue Sea – Theatre Royal Haymarket, London

It begins with an attempted suicide. As The Deep Blue Sea opens, Tamsin Greig’s Hester is slumped in front of an unlit gas fire. Unconscious but still alive, her death has been thwarted by her forgetting to put a shilling in the meter.

In early 1950s London, Hester lives as Mrs Page, the wife of former test pilot Freddie Page (Hadley Fraser). But they are living in relative penury; the rent is late on their damp, grubby one-bedroom flat with wallpaper peeling off the walls. As Hester is aroused from her attempt and struggles to regain an even keel, she bites at everyone who comes near, whether that’s her intrusive neighbours, her louche but ineffectual partner, or her real husband, who has yet to grant her the divorce she asked for.

There is little to laugh at in Terence Rattigan’s original script, populated as it is by people in varying states of emotional pain. Director Lindsay Posner’s production, transferring from its 2024 run at Bath’s Ustinov Theatre, does manage to pepper moments of levity, gently twisting line readings and sardonic performances, allowing the tension of Hester’s despair some counterbalance. Chief among these is Finbar Lynch’s Miller, the former doctor whom the residents have come to rely on, and Selina Cadell as an archetypal, some would say stereotypical, salt-of-the-earth lower-class landlady.

Among such cyphers, Greig’s Hester has her ordinariness elevated. Wry, biting and proud when in company, it is in the moments alone that Greig really finds the character’s true feelings. The production does, though, fail to enlighten us as to why Hester and Freddie were ever together, much less whether they should stay a couple, with Greig and Fraser’s characters seemingly intractably repulsed by each other. More effective is the warmth and deep affection between Hester and her estranged husband, Sir William Collyer (Nicholas Farrell). Hester’s continued rejection of William’s devotion, in favour of the mercurial and difficult behaviour of her lover, makes the character’s turmoil so desperate.

A repeated motif of the song Stormy Weather between the acts is, perhaps, a little too on-the-nose for this tale of depressive love and the anguish surrounding a woman at her lowest. The production’s languorous pace also works against it, Rattigan’s three-act structure stretching out into the night. But part of that length is due to a liberal amount of silence; painful, mournful, horrific silence as Hester is lost in a world of her own creation, dragging us in with her.

And it is Hester, one of Rattigan’s greatest characters, that rises above all else in the piece. As she goes to put a shilling in the meter and opens the gas tap, we cannot tell whether Hester is going to end the play as she began, or instead light the gas fire to warm herself. In Greig’s performance, either outcome would be validated by the hours before, and that is her triumph. In this portrait of misery, Hester is unpredictable but utterly consistent, as is the play around her.

Continues until 21 June 2025