When a crazy little thing called love breaks down
The Deep Blue Sea (Minerva Theatre, Chichester) Verdict: That kitchen sinking feeling ★★★✩✩
FUNNY what you hear on the way to the car park. En route from The Deep Blue Sea, one woman said to her friend: ‘It was good.’ ‘yes,’ said the friend, ‘but if I’d known what it was about, I probably wouldn’t have gone.’
So let’s reveal that Terence Rattigan’s 1952 piece starts off with a body by a gas fire — only for neighbours to establish the wouldbe suicide hadn’t put a shilling in the meter, so the gas supply ran out first.
Why would elegant Hester want to kill herself? The play gives the answer.
In Paul Foster’s thoughtful production, the action plays out in a shabby room. you can see the dirty foundations. It’s claustrophobic when the door is locked, but neighbours are forever knocking or listening to rows from the staircase.
Hester has a husband, a judge, Sir William Collyer (Gerald Kyd), who is crazy about her even though she left him for feckless RAF man Freddie Page. And when Nancy Carroll’s Hester (right) is left with Hadley Fraser’s Freddie, it’s clear what binds them — sex. But it’s also clear that sex isn’t enough: Hester wants the emotional commitment she didn’t get from her (sexily) repressed husband, and which Freddie can’t provide, either. Carroll’s is the eyecatching performance, but Fraser has the interesting part. The play was prompted by the gas fire suicide of Rattigan’s exlover, Kenneth Morgan. Rattigan nails what happens when a man (it’s always a man) finds himself emotionally out of his depth when a woman (it’s usually a woman) demands more than he can offer. The saving of Hester comes from Mr Miller, a disgraced German doctor, played by Matthew Cottle. They connect through empathy, not sex. It’s less restrained than the film version with Vivien Leigh. But it does justice to Terence Rattigan’s emotional insight.