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The Deep Blue Sea

Published Wednesday 26 July 2006 at 16:50 by Anne Hopper

Martin Johns’ fine setting of a drab flat in fifties London admirably suggests the claustrophobia suffered by its occupants. As the play begins, vicar’s daughter Hester has bungled a suicide attempt, a criminal offence and the actions of her neighbours reveal that she left an unhappy marriage to a judge and ran away with her lover Freddie, an alcoholic former wartime RAF pilot. The relationship has run its course. Freddie cannot return Hester’s overwhelming passion - she feels she cannot live without him.

“Caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, the deep blue sea sometimes looks very inviting,” says Hester and Marilyn Cutts gives a strong performance in the leading role, admirably suggesting a desperate woman who can see everything she needs to control slipping away. Kieran Buckeridge as Freddie suggests genuine feelings beneath the caddish exterior with an equal desperation to escape the corner he’s been backed into.

Kate Layden brings much warmth to the role of the housekeeper, lifting the gloom with perfectly timed responses, and Peter Shorey is a dignified and sympathetic Justice Collyer, bewildered that his love can never be enough to satisfy his wife. As the struck off doctor Miller, Robert Whelan proves to be Hester’s and the play’s saviour - we never know his crime but this actor lifts the production whenever he’s on stage, ultimately transferring strength to Hester with some of Rattigan’s most profound lines.

Ian Forrest’s direction is impeccable, rightly treating a respected play as a period piece. But in real life and in the theatre we have come a long way from the taboos of the fifties and in less inhibited times this play, while not irrelevant, is not the dramatic tour de force it once was.

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