The Deep Blue Sea

by Terrence Rattigan

seen at the National Theatre (Lyttleton) on 15 August 2016

Carrie Cracknell directs Helen McCrory as Hester Collyer, Tom Burke as Freddie Page and Peter Sullivan as William Collyer in this fine revival of Rattigan's 1952 play. 

Tom Scutt's stage design reveals both the living room and the kitchen of the flat where 'Mr and Mrs Page' live, with the bedroom hinted at when necessary through a gauze screen. Behind the door to the flat we can glimpse the common stairway to other flats, and indeed the main walls of the storey above are also revealed instead of implying an implausibly high ceiling. This clever use of the space allows other residents to come and go (mainly one presumes leaving for work in the morning and returning in the evening), reminding us that we are being shown just one crisis in one flat amongst thousands.

The opening is melodramatic, with the discovery of Hester lying unconscious before an unlit gas fire - a suicide attempt which has failed because there was not sufficient money in the meter to produce a fatal quantity of gas. A neighbour who is 'not a doctor' nevertheless pronounces that Hester cannot have swallowed enough aspirin to damage her health, though he does proceed to administer an emetic.

A young couple from another flat in the building are also present and anxious to help, though their intervention precipitates an unwelcome meeting between Hester and her husband. Here we see Rattigan's masterly control of a dramatic situation. With brilliant economy he indicates the social standing of the landlady, the earnest couple, and Hester herself, while at the same time making it plain that these people hardly know one another even though they live in the same building. When Mrs Elton the landlady feels compelled to reveal that Hester is not in fact 'Mrs Page' the frisson of alarm for Ann and Philip Welch is almost palpable, and when they discover that her husband is actually Sir William Collyer they immediately start to address her as 'Lady Collyer', feeling rather uncomfortable when she asks them not to.

These social distinctions seem almost laughably antiquated; a couple living together with one of them not yet divorced would not necessarily be remarkable nowadays. But sixty years ago such an arrangement was clandestine and open to censure. These and other details help place the situation in a precise period which may threaten to make the concerns of the characters almost trivial.

But this is not what happens. Hester is in deep pain, escaping from what she has come to recognise as a loveless marriage (at least on her side) but also being forced to realise that the man she wants to live with is shallow and ultimately unwilling, perhaps even unable, to make a commitment to stay with her. Helen McCrory wonderfully conveys Hester's anger, despair, shame and dreadful need, but also shows something of the allure she must have had at her best when the affair began. Peter Sullivan as her husband William seems a dry stick at first, as he interrogates her forensically (he is a barrister) both about her failed suicide and about the more general circumstances of her life since she left him. We may, with Hester, recoil at this coldness, but it masks his own bafflement and hurt. There are still flashes of accord between the two - another great Rattigan touch; it is not all animosity, but rather a fatal growing apart.

Tom Burke as Freddie Page has a difficult task in showing a man who is basically a bit of a cad (to use the contemporary term). Inevitably, given our natural sympathy for Hester, his attitude towards her strikes us as superficial and unpleasant. He is self-centred and immature, and also unwilling to face his demons. Like many young men of the time he is adrift after the excitement of war service in the RAF, and now at the dangerous time of life when he is no longer fit to be a test pilot, not least for having become too reliant on alcohol as a means to avoid self-scrutiny. While none of this may excuse his treatment of Hester, and the general cowardice with which he arranges to leave her, it it least shows us yet another facet of the complexity of life which Rattigan always perceives. Maybe Freddie is deluding himself in thinking that he could pull himself together on his own, while knowing that with Hester he could only continue to drink, but in this interpretation there is a slight chance that he is right. 

In the meantime Hester must decide what to do, and only a further intervention by the strange 'Mr Miller', the German neighbour who is 'not a doctor' enables her to turn from despair for good. While Mr Miller is at one level a rather clunky dramatic device, giving words of experience from a traumatic experience of his own, again we are presented with someone very specific to his time - an enemy alien evidently interned on the Isle of Man during the war, and a doctor who has been struck off the register for some unspecified action - or who possibly is just not allowed to practise because his training is not recognised. (One assumes something like an illegal abortion probably is behind the mystery). The play, though dealing with the sort of breakdown of relationships which can occur in any time and social situation, constantly elaborates the nuances of its own particular narrative by embedding it in the social mores of its time. The cut glass accents and the social distinctions may be the stuff of later satire but in Rattigan's hands they remain superb tools for revealing the very human agonies they seek to contain.