The Deep Blue Sea, which premiered in 1952 with Peggy Ashcroft and Kenneth More in the lead roles, used to be thought of as Terence Rattigan’s masterpiece and has often been revived on stage, film and television.
He was inspired to write it when his lover, Ken Morgan, committed suicide, but homosexuality was illegal in Britain in the 1950s and he knew there was no way the play could have been staged in the commercial theatre had it been about a gay couple.
Hester Collyer, a respectable middle class clergyman’s daughter, who is married to a High Court Judge, absconds with Freddie Page, a man much younger than herself, a former RAF pilot whose heyday was during the Battle of Britain in 1940.
He cannot cope with the emotional demands she makes on him and spends much of his time pub-crawling and on the golf course. He behaves badly not because he is bad but because he is hopelessly out of his depth. The play opens with Hester having failed to commit suicide.
The Deep Blue Sea, much admired in its day for its understatement, is now very much an early 1950s period piece and the entrances and exits creak badly. Lindsay Posner’s revival was initially seen at the tiny Ustinov Studio in Bath. It looks a bit lost and muted in the much larger Theatre Royal in London. The actors often talk too softly.
Everything about the production feels on the staid side. Tamsin Greig is Hester Collyer. Hadley Fraser is Freddie Page. The emotional intensity is there in the final scenes but not the sexual passion. It is difficult to believe that they ever had an affair.
More, too, could have been made of that shocking moment when Freddie gives Hester a shilling, stating that he is giving it just in case he’s late for dinner and so that she can feed the gas meter.
Nicholas Farrell is the Judge and Finbar Lynch the doctor who has been struck off the register. Preston Nyman has a subtly comic scene, playing a naïve young man, a neighbour, giving unwanted advice to an older woman.
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