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It was Graham Greene who talked about the “splinter of ice” in the heart of a true writer. The Deep Blue Sea tells another story. Beneath its crystal-cut surface, Terence Rattigan’s 1952 play feels born of molten agony. Rattigan wrung the drama from the experience of losing his former lover, Kenny Morgan, to suicide, creating through his own pain one of the great female roles of the 20th century. She’s exquisitely played by Tamsin Greig in Lindsay Posner’s quietly affecting production.
You can feel the personal torment beneath the narrative. Rattigan’s play opens with a body that is not a body: an apparently lifeless form lying before a gas fire. But, in this case, she is still breathing. The simple lack of a shilling in the gas meter is the sliver between Hester Collyer and death from asphyxiation and the next two hours are a walk with her along the thin line between this world and the next.
And through its handful of characters, Rattigan’s play draws a portrait of drab, repressive postwar Britain, where, behind the net curtains, so many knew first-hand the tiny margins between surviving and dying. So many knew, too, about living with secrets and shame. There’s an ache of loss to this play.
Greig catches subtly the fight going on inside Hester, a woman who has left her respectable marriage to live in a dingy flat with a man who can’t return the intensity of her love. Brought round from her suicide attempt, Greig’s Hester radiates polite English embarrassment as her neighbours fuss around her. She is, after all, a vicar’s daughter and the former wife of judge. Greig finds every ounce of comedy in Hester’s mordant wit. “I can remember what you look like,” she replies pithily, when her lover, Freddie, complains that she hasn’t looked at him since he walked through the door. But left alone she seems to shrink, sitting motionless in an armchair as if frozen by despair.
Hadley Fraser brings an edge of recklessness to Freddie, a former RAF ace whose “life stopped in 1940”, who dare not let himself feel too much and who is drowning himself in whisky. There’s a gently eloquent performance too from Nicholas Farrell as Hester’s quietly heartbroken husband, the third casualty of the overwhelming passion that has seized his wife.
Perhaps Hester’s most telling conversations are with the concerned landlady (Selina Cadell), who sees everything but turns a blind eye, and with the struck-off German doctor, who knows about living beyond hope and who brings her back from the brink twice. Played with crisp honesty by the excellent Finbar Lynch, his frankness draws laughs but it feels like the heart of the play. Like Chekhov, Rattigan depicts the courage it can take to just keep going.
On Peter McKintosh’s muted blue set, Posner’s production is understated — too understated at times: audibility is an issue that needs addressing. But it’s a delicate, sensitive revival of Rattigan’s compassionate masterpiece.
★★★★☆
To June 21, trh.co.uk
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