The Deep Blue Sea review: Tamsin Greig brings wit to okay drawing room drama
Tamsin Greig is sharp in as Hester, but this production does little of interest with drawing room drama The Deep Blue Sea
The Deep Blue Sea is not a jolly play. Indeed, it is a pretty dreary one. A cold open in which you are introduced to the protagonist Hester Collyer through a neighbour’s discovery of her in a heap on the floor, after she has attempted to gas herself in the night, makes this clear. But that doesn’t mean the play is without lightness of touch.
In fact, it is the certain buoyancy with which the bleakness of the play’s main themes – suicide, depression and unrequited love – are carried through the acts that makes Terence Rattigan’s play interesting. When Hester, for example, played by Friday Night Dinner star Tamsin Greig, comes to after her suicide attempt, she bats away her neighbour’s gushing concerns with dry wit and a cigarette in hand. “Oh no. Just a bit dopey, that’s all. Idiotic accident, wasn’t it? I’m terribly sorry for all the trouble I’ve caused!”
It’s the kind of tone that makes the play quintessentially British – a tragedy with a stiff upper lip. It is the punch produced when emotions do eventually tumble over the surface that allows the play to make an impact. Lindsay Posner’s production uses this adeptly to power the play to its emotional crescendos, especially at the close of the second act, but it is a trick that is not devoid of risks, as the few sniggers heard from the audience at the opening scene’s presumably meant-to-be tragic discovery exemplified.
Taking place in one room over 24 hours, The Deep Blue Sea is a traditional drawing room drama, which mostly relies on the wondering of who next will burst through the door for its tension. After the initial discovery of Hester, the audience quickly learns she has recently left a comfortable marriage with an older, well-to-do man for a love affair with a younger, handsome former pilot, but has fallen into despair as she grapples with the dual afflictions of love and lust.
Its staging by the Haymarket marks the latest instalment of the theatre’s new focus on “high-quality plays starring acclaimed acting talent”, which has so far included the likes of the universally raved about one-woman The Picture of Dorian Gray, Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. In other words, productions you can tell people you’ve seen with a certain sense of accomplishment.
Choosing to move to this focus in 2024 following the success of the Haymarket’s longest-ever running show – Only Fools and Horses: The Musical – marks a fairly bold shift, which in many ways is welcome. The opportunity to indulge in, quote unquote, more serious theatre is not without its merits, but I do wonder if the plodding pace of The Deep Blue Sea quite offers the payoff needed to combat 21st century attention spans. Sarah Snook in Dorian Gray showed it was more than possible to update period literature for a modern audience without making it naff, but this production doesn’t even try to update the themes, instead choosing to play it extremely straight. That’s more than fine, but it does prevent it from having any particular sense of wow factor.
That being said, Greig’s performance as Hester is a triumph. Greig is captivating on stage, switching her tone with ease from Mitford-eque flippancy to raw desperation. While we would almost definitely now be quick to count Hester as a victim of 1950s patriarchy, particularly the dependence of women on marriage for a livelihood, Rattigan’s writing in no way reduces Hester to just a pitiful, yearning housewife. Or, at least, she is shown to not have dissimilar amounts of autonomy, and certainly complexity, as the men in the play do. One does wonder if this may because the character was in fact initially conceived as a man, with the suicide of Rattigan’s former lover Kenneth Morgan heavily inspiring his writing of the play.
Ultimately, Hester defines the courage and challenges of rejecting comfort to have a shot at actually living. The difficulty to articulate one’s feelings, as well as the sometimes illegality of doing so – in suicide and homosexuality – is the struggle most successfully embodied by this production. Indeed, it is arguably the struggle most emblematic of theatre itself: “Don’t you think that might be dramatising it?” one character wryly asks another at one point.
But of course, dramatise our lives we must. When Greig desperately entreats her past lover not to imagine the what-could-have-been futures, she pleads with him: “Isn’t reality enough to occupy us?” As anyone who still turns out on a Wednesday night for the theatre knows, of course not.
The Deep Blue Sea | ★★★☆☆ | Theatre Royal Haymarket