The torch song Stormy Weather sobs between scenes in this revival of Terence Rattigan’s 1952 drama. Desire has shaken the heroine’s world like a tempest: keeps raining all the time. We’re in pre-gentrified west London, where renegade judge’s wife Hester (Tamsin Greig) has left married respectability to live with a younger man, Freddie Page (Oliver Chris), big on golf, short on prospects.
Peter McKintosh designs a room of gloom: peeling wallpaper, faded rugs, grey light sighing through the curtains. Even the landscape on the wall shows Weymouth Pier under washed-out skies. People smoke nervy cigs or gulp at corner shop claret. Quiet despair lurks in the silences.
The play opens with Hester’s attempted suicide – foiled because there wasn’t a shilling in the gas meter. Everything seems a humiliation. As an actor, Greig is made for wit, and heightens Hester’s snap, bite and self-deprecation (“on pub crawls I’m a terrible fish out of water”). She greets prurient neighbours with silky fatigue or awful little chuckles. You register the effort it takes to maintain some kind of front, and how her face sinks whenever she’s alone.
Lindsay Posner’s thoughtful production doesn’t always maximise the intimacy, yet Rattigan’s play clasps you by the wrist and holds on tight.
Trouble speaks to trouble: no one lives without hurt in this play, especially Finbar Lynch’s superbly brusque, watchful neighbour. Hester can’t talk honestly to Freddie, though she unpacks her heart with hushed candour to her estranged husband (a grave, silky Nicholas Farrell). As Freddie, Chris seems too tall for the shallow room – hugging a whisky bottle, he slumps in the battered armchair like a woozy giraffe. Faced with Hester’s raw need, he’s out of his depth, a one-time war hero whose world stopped in 1940.
The Deep Blue Sea doesn’t do period glamour: it’s frayed shirts, shoe polish, trudging on. Like all of Rattigan’s best plays, it traces a very British misery – shamed but stalwart, refusing to be furtive about sex and stormy weather.
At the Ustinov Studio, Theatre Royal Bath, until 1 June
