McCrory’s heart of the Deep Blue Sea
Helen McCrory mines the depths of despair in Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea at the National, but brings warmth and humanity to her role as Hester Collyer, the wife of a judge having an affair with a pilot in a Britain broken by war and austerity
The Deep Blue Sea National Theatre
No playwright mined the depths of despair quite like Terence Rattigan, and no actress mines the same depths quite like Helen McCrory. Therefore, it’s no surprise that the combination of both in this splendid new production from Carrie Cracknell is intoxicating, bringing new shades of complexity to this famous, much-revived work about an affair gone badly wrong in the aftermath of the Second World War.
It opens with the botched suicide attempt of Hester Collyer (McCrory), the estranged wife of a famous barrister now living in sin with her test-pilot lover in seedy lodgings in Ladbroke Grove. Whereas past productions have suspended the play in a sort of hinterland of clipped accents and ham teas, Cracknell makes each of the characters the embodiment of a broken Britain that has been scarred by the hardships of war. Tom Scutt’s set design illustrates this well – the lodging house is divided up by gauze walls behind which the tenants move like ghosts, shadowy figures in an austerity pea-souper.
McCrory, whose stage triumphs include Medea at the National, is simply wonderful. We see her Hester slowly uncoil from her suicide attempt, wryly playing to her neighbours’ noting that the gas cut out. “Yes, wasn’t that lucky?”
In fact, it’s a commendably quiet performance, giving the impression of a woman who knows she cannot ever break the mould of wifelet that society has bestowed upon her. Her sense of ruin as she realises lover Freddie is not coming back is achieved with her back to the audience, that smoky voice slowly cracking over the course of a terrible phone conversation.
She also captures brilliantly Hester’s essential niceness, something all too often lost amid the gloom. As landlady, Mrs Elton (Marion Bailey) observes that Hester is her favourite tenant because she likes nice people, but not necessarily good ones. In McCrory’s hands, you are never in doubt of Hester’s humanity.
There’s excellent work from Tom Burke as Freddie, the pilot who had a good war and is now drinking himself into oblivion. The callow cruelty with which he reads out Hester’s suicide note is underpinned by Burke’s heartbreaking impression that Freddie knows he is being unkind but is too far down a path of self-destruction to care.
Meanwhile, Peter Sullivan as Lord Collyer is not just a dry old stick, simultaneously controlling and neglectful, but a man who knows he cannot properly articulate his affections for his wife. In the scenes between the Collyers, the pacing sometimes needs to quicken, but this is a minor fault in a production of sustained emotional power.
Of the supporting cast, Bailey is good fun as Mrs Elton, like a little hedgehog working herself into a tizzy about her bothersome tenants. But the discovery of the evening is Nick Fletcher, who gives a devastating performance as Mr Miller, a tenant and former doctor who has been sent to prison for what is believed to be a homosexual act. Slowly, we see a friendship between Miller and Hester build until, in the most important scene of the play, he persuades her to choose life over death. The subsequent farewell to Freddie can only seem muted in comparison. On the play’s release in 1952, the
Observer’s critic declared that all Hester needed was a good slap. At the end of this open-hearted production, I wanted to give her (and indeed all of the cast) a reassuring hug.