THEATRE
★★★★✩ (youtube.com/user/ntdiscovertheatre)
FOR THE two decades from the premiere of French Without Tears in 1936,Terence Rattigan was Britain’s most successful dramatist. Then after the Royal Court revolution, spearheaded by Osborne,arden and Wesker, his work was dismissed as middlebrow entertainment fit only for his own fictional playgoer, Aunt Edna.
Now Arden is forgotten and Osborne and Wesker are rarely performed. It is Rattigan whose insights into emotional and social repression and the mysteries of the human heart continue to enthral audiences.
Along with The Browning Version, The Deep Blue Sea has claims to being Rattigan’s finest play. In The Browning Version, a schoolmaster extols the virtues of classical drama; in The Deep Blue Sea, Rattigan demonstrates them. Over a single day, he lays bare the soul of Hester Collyer, a middle-class English woman whose passions are as all-consuming as those of any Greek heroine.
The play opens with Hester (Helen Mccrory), discovered after a failed attempt to gas herself. Hester is not the sort of woman to remember to feed the gas meter. Having fled from a companionable but passionless marriage to a judge, Sir William Collyer, she lives in dingy digs with handsome but shallow former RAF pilot Freddie Page.
She could not lovewilliam as he wanted and Freddie cannot love her as she wants. When he forgets her birthday, Hester throws away the dinner she has prepared and attempts suicide. Miller, the disgraced doctor who treats her, insists that “after 24 hours in bed, she will be completely recovered”.
In the event, her day is far more taxing and, after confrontations with both her husband and lover, she is forced to choose anew whether she wants to live or die.
THIS is the sort of production that the National does best and, in recent years, has done far too rarely. Anyone fearing that, following current trends, director Carrie Cracknell would invoke Rattigan’s real-life inspiration to change Hester’s sex, or set the play symbolically on the seabed, can rest assured. Except for minor miscalculations, such as the Hammer Horror sound effects, Cracknell plays it admirably straight.
Her most inspired decision is to cast the powerful Peter Sullivan as the Judge.the part is usually played as a desiccated old stick, thereby explaining, if not justifying, Hester’s adultery; indeed, in Terence Davies’s 2011 film version, Rachel Weisz’s choice between Simon Russell Beale and Tom Hiddleston was a no-brainer.
Here, Sullivan is more than a match for Tom Burke’s Freddie, which underlines the inexorable, irrational force of Hester’s love.
Sullivan is excellent, as are Marion Bailey as Hester’s landlady, Hubert Burton and Yolanda Kettle as her young neighbours, and Nick Fletcher as Miller, whose offence is left deliberately undefined. Only Burke fails to have the measure of his role.
But the production belongs to Helen Mccrory’s Hester.arguably, the finest actress of her generation, Mccrory captures every facet of her protean character, from brittle humour through naked passion to suppressed despair.
Let us hope that, when the National reopens, it will do so with productions like this, rather than its more modish efforts.