Review: THE DEEP BLUE SEA, Theatre Royal Haymarket

Religion and class, the twin pillars of the prewar order, are crumbling to dust. Where to find meaning in the nihilism of the new post-war world? Terence Rattigan’s most melancholic play arrives in London at a moment of reckoning for the once-popular, now somewhat sidelined playwright. Man and Boy is a surprise addition to The National Theatre’s new season and there’s a campaign to rechristen the Duchess Theatre after him. Is he a relic of the past or deserving of revival?

Hester Collyer has abandoned her stable yet suffocating marriage to Sir William, a high court judge, for a turbulent and destructive affair with Freddie, a former RAF pilot now drifting aimlessly from one dead end to the next. The walls of her dingy flat close in on her as she feels the last embers of passion flickering out. Freddie and Sir William orbit her as helpless satellites, drawn into the inescapable gravity of her love, or lust, two edges of the same blade, each cutting with ruthless brutality.

Lindsay Posner’s austere production is almost obsequiously faithful to the text. No high-tech high-gloss spectacles here please. Barely a lighting change. Just reliance on the soulful elegance of its performances. A shame then that the gamble doesn’t quite pay off.

Posner’s production premiered at the Ustinov Studio in Bath, where in the space’s tight-knit intimacy you would have choked on the musty claustrophobia. Now transferring to a cavernous West End theatre, the audience are relegated to observers peeping in, not guests at the dinner table.

Perhaps that is why Tamsin Greig’s performance doesn’t quite hit the mark. Only understated glimpses of her fist-clenched turmoil are visible through cracks in her marble chiselled façade. Icy glares directed out to the audience are not enough to convince that she is teetering on the verge of suicide or fill the vast space with groaning melancholy.

It’s only in the play’s quietly explosive denouement that Hester unravels into a childlike state, giddy with narcissism, staring into the void and laughing. In this moment, her status as a bruised victim and a selfish perpetrator of others' pain is crystalised, a duality that haunts every character.

Hadley Fraser’s Freddie brims with uneasy boyish charm. A harlequin grin masks confusion. Darting eyes give away his discord in a world that has outgrown him, drunk on war nostalgia and cheap whisky. Nicholas Farrell’s Sir William has a prowling, Dickensian scowl, every deliberately rigid gesture radiating the corrosive love for Hester festering inside him. 

Rattigan grants us a flicker of warmth in Finbar Lynch’s ethereal Mr Miller. Shifty and shy, a former doctor now struck off for “sneaking”  heavily implied to be homosexual - he’s an alien materialised from a separate universe, almost comically so. Like Freddie he is at odds with a new world still haunted by Victorian morality, something that makes his unlikely friendship with Hester all the more heart-string tugging. 

Rattigan’s masterpiece endures because he avoids factionalism, a balance that Posner eruditely draws out. Nobody is wholly guilty or innocent – an idea that echoes through decades. It may look out of date, but it feels timeless.

The Deep Blue Sea plays at the Theatre Royal Haymarket until 21 June

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