A claustrophobic production of a mid-century masterpiece
THE DEEP BLUE SEA TERENCE RATTIGAN Ustinov Studio, Theatre Royal Bath, until June 1
TERENCE RATTIGAN’S most personal play, The Deep Blue Sea, was inspired by the death of his former lover, Kenneth Morgan – the news arrived as Rattigan prepared for a preview performance of a new play. His subsequent study of doomed love speaks to the present as much as it does to the postwar Britain it so perfectly encapsulates. Here is a London that has yet to bloom into the sprawling multicultural wonder it is today: where High Court judges can still be found in slim telephone directories, and any pub or club can be called to reach a waylaid husband, if required.
We encounter a microcosm of 1950s society over a single day that begins with Hester (Tamsin Greig) lying unconscious in front of an unlit gas fire, having attempted suicide. There’s the upper-class society of her husband, Sir William (a suave Nicholas Farrell), with its black-tie dinners, the middle-class world of the young and naive couple who live above Hester, and the working classes to which the landlady, Mrs Elton (Felicity Montagu), belongs, living only to work – and, in Mrs Elton’s case, to gossip. We see its underbelly too, in the disgraced doctor turned bookmaker’s assistant Mr Miller (Finbar Lynch). That era may have passed, but matters of the heart are proved timeless in Lindsay Posner’s production.
Hester has left Sir William, a High Court judge, to live with her younger lover, an ex-RAF pilot, Freddie (Oliver Chris). Ten months on, following a failed stint in Canada that ended when Freddie lost his job after crashing a plane while drunk, they have returned to London and holed up in a small flat in Ladbroke Grove, a short distance from Hester’s former life, yet worlds away. The grey tones of Peter McKintosh’s set suck the life out of the flat’s main room, where the entirety of the play’s events take place, accentuating the claustrophobia of Posner’s production. This is heightened by the tightness of the Ustinov’s 126-seat space: the audience is almost on top of the action. There is nowhere for Hester to hide in this place, particularly when it is invaded by a string of voyeur-like neighbours who, even when not present, are alert to events in the flat – sound carries in a building like this, Miller reminds Hester. The thin walls, with their peeling paper, keep no secrets.
Hester is a woman misaligned with the men involved in her life. As Sir William loves the idea of Hester, mistaking it for her reality, she repeats the falsehood with Freddie. She hopes in vain that he will reciprocate her love, acutely aware that it will never happen. Mentally stuck in 1940, Freddie has been emotionally stunted by the war, and his interests in life, bar golf, have been destroyed by his growing reliance on alcohol. You wonder what draws
