The Deep Blue Sea Review
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| By
Hay Brunsdon
A devastating portrait of passion, shame, and the wreckage in between.
Love makes fools of us all—and this revival of Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea unpicks that madness with gripping clarity. Opening with Hester Collyer’s (Tamsin Greig) failed suicide attempt in a shabby Ladbroke Grove flat, the play plunges us into the aftermath of passion gone awry. With Etta James’ velvety Stormy Weather haunting the silence, it’s a gut-punch of an opening. Bleak? Yes, but also very brave.
Greig is astonishing as Hester: brittle but defiant, articulate but unravelled, a woman whose love is too vast to summarise and too heavy to carry. She’s caught between the memory of stability with her ex-husband Sir William (Nicholas Farrell, quietly heart-breaking) and the searing, one-sided intensity of her relationship with Freddie. Hadley Fraser brings an infuriating, luminous charm to Freddie—a has-been RAF pilot turned charismatic layabout (airborne to chairborne), maddeningly selfish, baffled by the depth of Hester’s feelings, and utterly unprepared to return them in the way she needs.
Their chemistry is toxic; both erratic and erotic. She’s like a junkie and he’s her only dopamine hit. Freddie is the OG Breadcrumber, giving her just enough to keep her hooked but soon passion becomes punishment. He scoffs at her birthday suicide note while she clings to the belief it was fate they met. If Hester is the self-hating moth, then Freddie is surely the flame: beautiful, blazing, and utterly incapable of lasting warmth.
Director Lindsay Posner masterfully builds tension, You could feel the entire theatre hold its breath when Freddie found Hestor’s suicide note and there was an audible gasp in the auditorium when he tossed her a coin for the gas metre after it ran out during her first suicide attempt. Ouch!
Rattigan’s writing allows for no easy answers. The love triangle is grippingly messy: Hester’s former life with Bill wasn’t cold, just lacking passion. Meanwhile, Freddie offers sparks without safety. “I can’t be a Romeo all the time,” he says, petulantly. And he isn’t.
Finbar Lynch impresses as Mr Miller, the disgraced doctor next door who sees Hester clearly—her intelligence, her shame, her near-unbearable need. Selina Cadell provides crisp comic relief as landlady Mrs Elton, one of the many nosy neighbours offering advice: ‘take a couple of sleeping pills, go to Italy, try Lyme Regis’ etc.
Serious, haunting, and with moments of dark humour, The Deep Blue Sea is a timeless exploration of emotional extremity and longing. It asks what we really want from love—and what we’re willing to lose to feel it.
It might be set in the 1950s, but it feels pretty familiar. That ‘can’t-live-without-you’ passion at 11pm, then blocked by 7am? Honestly, it’s giving Tinder circa 2017. (Though, let's be real, I’d still pick Bill every time.)