An affair that’s as sexy as a cold fish
The Deep Blue Sea (Royal National Theatre) Verdict: Hidden shallows
WHEN Rattigan is done really well, English theatregoers will leave the show with a feeling almost of shame. Rattigan is the great depicter of English reserve, of stiff restraint.
‘How I hate getting tangled up in other people’s emotions,’ says a character in the Deep Blue sea.
Yet top-class Rattigan productions suggest that gay, unhappy terence (who wrote at a time when gay love was illegal) wanted us, as a people, to declare our feelings. He sensed that bottling things up made us miserable.
the Royal National’s new production of Rattigan’s the Deep Blue sea fails in this respect. there are several things to admire here, but at the end I felt unmoved. It left me as cold as the sort of dead fish Rattigan often sketched.
Helen McCrory plays Hester Collyer, who has just tried to gas herself. the show opens with neighbours bursting in to her living room and reviving her after this suicide attempt. Hester has split from her lawyer husband (Peter sullivan) and is now being neglected by her younger, live-in lover, Freddie. Former RaF pilot Freddie is turning to drink.
Hester has developed an ‘evil affinity’ for this sot. the attraction between them, purely lustful, is killing both of them.
Yet maybe it is preferable to stiff upper lippishness. Is a supposedly dashing toyboy not more necessary for a woman’s needs than an emotionally repressed husband?
tom scutt’s design, on the Lyttelton stage, shows us various levels in the Notting Hill boarding house where Hester and Freddie have their drab flat. No effort has been spared in the staging. the lighting is blue, as suits the title.
Miss McCrory is, as ever, watchable; yet despite the period detail of the set, her accent and attitudes seem too modern for early Fifties London. Why, when I watch this talented actress, does it strike me that she is projecting her own vanity as much as the character of her role?
DIRECtOR Carrie Cracknell makes almost no effort to explore the class subtleties which abound in Rattigan. Marion Bailey, as landlady Mrs Elton, sounds far too posh. More could be made of the younger neighbours, the snooping Welches, were they deftly lower middle-class.
tom Burke makes an inoffensive, unsexy Freddie. Is that right? should he not be more of a swine? Where is the spark between him and Hester? adetomiwa Edun is miscast as Freddie’s old RaF chum, but Nick Fletcher does a tidy job as disgraced Dr Miller.
the whole thing trundles along fine enough. this will make a perfectly decent night out and Rattigan is always a well-crafted pleasure. But the emotional currents here are more what you would find in the shallows than in the briny depths.