The Deep Blue Sea: Tamsin Greig’s Rattigan revival is claustrophobic and needle-sharp
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Terence Rattigan’s finest play (though the competition is fierce) opened in the West End to acclaim in March 1952. It stands as a testament both to the sorrows to which passionate flesh is heir and the precise wretchedness of that post-war moment.
Far from bunting and happy-ever-after, the peace dividend was scant, society scarred: men looking back to wartime glory days through whisky tumblers, women caught between domesticity and unrealisable dreams, stigmas at every turn.
Turbulent waters, with Rattigan’s heroine, Hester Collyer – first seen being roused from a gas-fire suicide attempt – drowning in them. She has lunged for romance – in the comely shape of ex-RAF man Freddie Page, jettisoning her judge husband, and polite society – but has been left in despair by their incompatibility and his drink-assisted aloofness.
The challenge of any revival is to make us feel the atmosphere of repression, and depression, like a pea-souper. In this, Lindsay Posner’s smartly attentive production has a terrific asset: Tamsin Greig. Here’s an actress widely admired on account of her aptitude for deadpan comedy – from Green Wing to Friday Night Dinner – now applying her gifts for restraint, impassivity and interiority to modern tragedy.
There’s a lot of talking in the play – with fair amounts of exposition – but aside from handling the language with a clipped authenticity, Greig communicates with every expression, her default blankness a mask across which wounded pride, pensive concern and stabbing hurt mesmerisingly flicker.
When she narrows her eyes at Felicity Montagu’s housekeeper Mrs Elton, who has blabbed her amorous secrets, you register her wrath. Folded arms tell their own defensive story, a polite smile can drip acid. An inclination of an eyebrow, hands clasped, as Hester recounts being swept away by Freddie’s overtures (“I had no hope”) distils an ocean of infatuation in a simple glance, with her husband (Nicholas Farrell starchy yet sympathetic) the quietly shattered recipient of her confession.
She can turn on a sixpence between mad laughter and crumpled hysteria. She weeps and pleads in chilling, lonely desperation at Freddie’s resolution to break with her, but the steely composure she finds at the play’s closing stages is ineffably eloquent of her newfound sense of resolution and independence.
Though it has been very hard to step into this role since the late Helen McCrory’s powerhouse turn at the National in 2016, Greig makes it her own, helped by the compactness of the Ustinov. We’re almost part of the furniture in Peter McKintosh’s meticulous evocation of a north London mansion-flat, with its peeling wallpaper and forlorn amateur artwork.
So confined is the environment, that it makes things rather tougher for Oliver Chris as the upright but rudderless Freddie. Chris’s overpowering physical presence has a bull in a china-shop energy, matching Freddie’s inadvertently bruising good-eggishness. But he could take a leaf out of Finbar Lynch as the furtively helpful neighbour Miller, the model of telling understatement. There’s a sonic boom to Chris’s air-man that, in the couple’s more bellowing exchanges, could rattle crockery and would surely have half the street twitching their curtains. A dab more Rattiganesque restraint and a very good revival could become a great one.
Until June 1. Tickets: 01225 448844; theatreroyal.org.uk
