Writer: Terence Rattigan<\/b>
Director: Lindsay Posner<\/b>
It begins with an attempted suicide. As The Deep Blue Sea opens, Tamsin Greig\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s her intrusive neighbours, her louche but ineffectual partner, or her real husband, who has yet to grant her the divorce she asked for.<\/p>\n
There is little to laugh at in Terence Rattigan\u2019s original script, populated as it is by people in varying states of emotional pain. Director Lindsay Posner\u2019s production, transferring from its 2024 run at Bath\u2019s Ustinov Theatre, does manage to pepper moments of levity, gently twisting line readings and sardonic performances, allowing the tension of Hester\u2019s despair some counterbalance. Chief among these is Finbar Lynch\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Among such cyphers, Greig\u2019s Hester has her ordinariness elevated. Wry, biting and proud when in company, it is in the moments alone that Greig really finds the character\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s continued rejection of William\u2019s devotion, in favour of the mercurial and difficult behaviour of her lover, makes the character\u2019s turmoil so desperate.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s languorous pace also works against it, Rattigan\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
And it is Hester, one of Rattigan\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Continues until 21 June 2025<\/b>