Tamsin Greig’s peerless as a peeress with a broken heart
The Deep Blue Sea (Ustinov Studio, Bath)
Verdict: A plunge into the depths ★★★★★
HESTER COLLYER is curled beneath a blanket beside a cold gas fire. The reason for her despair is her younger lover, Freddie, who can’t reciprocate her passion. She had left her devoted husband, a distinguished judge, to be with him. Back in 1952, this was called ‘living in sin’ and suicide was a crime.
All this is revealed early on in Terence Rattigan’s meticulously plotted play, a masterpiece of careful disclosure. While Tamsin Greig’s blanched, humiliated Hester battles for selfpossession, her sitting room, like her privacy, is invaded by well-meaning neighbours, and her broken heart and her shame brutally exposed.
The song Stormy Weather punctuates Lindsay Posner’s devastating revival, its lyrics painfully apt. ‘Since my man and I ain’t together, keeps raining all of the time.’ The plaster is damp-stained, the wallpaper peeling. Hester has fallen far from her chauffeur-driven life as Lady Collyer.
There’s tremendous poignancy in the scenes between Hester and Nicholas Farrell’s Sir William, who still loves her but without the allconsuming intensity she craves. Farrell’s clever, caring William seems a much better match for her than callow Freddie.
Hester knows it, but she’s mad about the boy. There’s no playwright
sharper than Rattigan on the subject of unequal love.
A riveting Greig perfectly suggests Hester’s complex, quicksilver emotions, her eyes sparking then guttering like a flame, wild laughter imploding into desolate sobs. ‘How I hate getting tangled up in other people’s emotions,’ says Oliver Chris’s unrestrained, unthinking Freddie, numbed following an adrenaline-fuelled war, and seeking oblivion in a bottle.
By contrast, as the mysteriously disgraced doctor, Finbar Lynch has a mesmerising stillness, a quiet wisdom. His healing power comes from fully understanding Hester’s pain.
At the end, she turns on the gas fire again, its hiss audible. Deeply satisfying drama.
Until June 1.