Theatre
Review
Review: The Deep Blue Sea
Tamsin Grieg charms and unsettles in Lindsay Posner’s powerful revival
How does a person move forward in the world without love? Terrance Rattigan’s 1952 play provides no satisfying answers, and Lindsay Posner’s revival of The Deep Blue Sea at the Theatre Royal Haymarket doesn’t offer any either. Yet the dreary situation of estranged wife Hester Collyer, played to excellence by Tamsin Greig, resolves into a quiet decision to find a foothold, to keep keeping on, to try.
Caught between her rich and steady older husband, whom she doesn’t love, and her irresponsible, thoughtless younger lover, who doesn’t love her, Hester attempts to take her own life. The play takes place over the day that follows, as Hester survives her suicide and scrambles to hold onto Freddie (Hadley Fraser), who – despite her passion – is far more interested in his golf clubs than in her. When, upon learning of her suicide, Freddy decides to leave, Hester’s desperation mounts, and Tamsin Greig’s performance becomes something horrific, in the most impressive way.
Peter Mckintosh’s set is the perfect home for this prevailing despondency. The wallpaper peels. Everything is faded and grey. On the walls hang Hester’s own pictures, reminders that she once did something just for herself. Her art supplies are piled in a corner. In this space, Greig shows Hester pinballing between sardonic and pathetic, between quips and screams. Her need to hold onto Freddy, her attempts to manipulate him to stay and her ultimate frenzy when she realises that she can’t, are horrible and hard to look away from. She is a woman so disgusted with herself that she no longer has a need for dignity – it slips away, over the course of the play, until a final conversation with her neighbour and disgraced doctor (Finbar Lynch) convinces her to live another day.
It’s heavy stuff and offers the audience no neatly packaged hope. 70 years on, Rattigan’s assertion that a person cannot just declare life is precious and make it so feels just as pertinent. But what The Deep Blue Sea does validate is the decaying power of loneliness; the necessity of love to justify life. Posner’s revival assures us that we are entitled to our madness when we lose it, and that continuing on is the only way to find it again.
The Deep Blue Sea is playing until 21 June at Theatre Royal Haymarket – find tickets here
