Peter Viney's Blog

The Deep Blue Sea
By Terence Rattigan

Lyttelton Theatre at the National Theatre
London
Started June 2016
NT Live streaming from 9 July 2020

Directed by Carrie Cracknell
Designed by Tom Scutt
Music by Stuart Earl

CAST

Marion Bailey- Mrs Elton, the landlady
Hubert Burton – Philip Welch, a neighbour
Yolanda Kettle – Ann Welch, a neighbour
Helen McCrory- Hester Collyer
Nick Fletcher – Mr Miller, an ex-doctor
Peter Sullivan – Sir William Collyer, a judge
Tom Burke – Freddie Page, a test pilot
Adetomiwa Edun – Jackie Jackson, a pilot

There is an ensemble of six

We had planned to be in the USA in June, so had packed May and July 2020 with theatre. Every couple of days a calendar message flashes up on my screen for yet another cancelled production … on Tuesday this week it was (coincidentally the same theatre):

 The Corn is Green, Lyttelton Theatre, South Bank, London SE1 9PX, England. Stalls E19, E20.  7 July 2020. 14.15. Alert when I need to leave. Traffic is light. 2 hours 36 minutes.

So the contrast is being at the Lyttelton theatre live versus watching a past production on screen. We haven’t gone overboard on streamed theatre, grateful as we are for it. The National Theatre allows members to access downloadable full programmes, and we are members though we haven’t even been there this year. We tend towards stuff we knew and liked – One Man Two Guv’nors or The Bridge Theatre A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The Globe onscreen doesn’t appeal because so much of the joy is being there in the open. We seem to be avoiding plays we don’t know at all.

This is a tale of two theatres, of lockdown, of streamed theatre versus live theatre. See also my review of The Chichester production of The Deep Blue Sea in 2019.   

RATTIGAN

My review of the film, The Deep Blue Sea, starring Rachel Weisz as Hester adds more detail on Terence Rattigan and the story behind it.

That story:

In early March 1949, Rattigan and the director Peter Glenville were leaving the Adelphi Hotel, Liverpool, when Terry announced, seemingly out of nowhere: ‘The play will open with the body discovered dead in front of the gas fire’. Earlier that day both men had been discussing Rattigan’s Adventure Story, which Glenville had directed, and which was in Liverpool on its pre-West End tour. Rattigan’s buoyant mood was shattered by a phone message that said Kenneth Morgan had killed himself. He was a former boyfriend of Rattigan’s; they had recently separated after Morgan, frustrated by Terry’s emotional detachment, had started seeing someone else. But the new boyfriend could not return his affections fully either, and, in despair, alone at home, Morgan undid the rubber hose on their stove and gassed himself. It is a sign both of Rattigan’s sharp writerly instincts and his emotional steeliness that within hours of this devastating news, he was already thinking how the situation might be turned into a play.
Dan Rebellato, An Introduction to The Deep Blue Sea. 2017

As with Separate Tables, the play was “heterosexualized.” In 1968, Rattigan said:

Terence Rattigan:  At last I can write about my particular sins without Lord Chamberlain-induced sex-change dishonesty … Perhaps I should re-write Deep Blue Sea as it really was meant to be, but after 20 years I just can’t remember why I made all that fuss

THE PLAY

Because it’s streamed, I’ve reviewed it in the same way as I do films. Watch once through. Go back and review it bit by bit on the computer. This means it’s much longer than a theatre review after the event.

Watching the streaming, I notice how often the camera has a character on the extreme edge of the image … a passing thought. There is also a definite muted colour palette to the whole production.

“Better turn her round to face the window!” The opening scene – Mrs Elton, Philip and Ann find Hester comatose

This version starts with loud echoing music in the darkened space, and the knocks on the door are heavily amplified drums, then knocking. The first lines about the smell of gas (off stage) are amplified echo too. As they bustle in, opening windows, Mrs Elton, the landlady, complains that Freddie Page must have left the gas cooker on. She is with her neighbours who smelled gas returning from work. They’re a young couple, Philip (Hubert Burton) and Anne (Yolanda Kettle). He is a civil servant. Anne is pregnant in this version … I don’t remember that before.

Then Hester Collyer (Helen McCrory) is found on the floor of her flat, empty aspirin bottle next to her, the gas turned on, but the meter (a shilling in the meter in those days) had run out. The flat is rather smarter than I expected. Hester is in a salmon coloured petticoat. We remembered when that odd colour was so prevalent. As she wakes she’s muttering incoherently  … stage direction slow thick murmur, the words almost indistinguishable (you’d never have known what she was saying in the actual theatre, but you can here!)

Mrs Elton goes to get Mr Miller, a bookie’s clerk who was struck off the medical register (we never find out why). He lives upstairs. He carries her into the bedroom (off) to give her an emetic injection.

Then Ann finds a suicide note on the mantelpiece. It’s addressed to Freddie. So Philip and Anne want Mrs Elton to contact her partner, Freddie Page, who is out. But it turns out that he is not her husband!

L to R: Ann (Yolanda Kettle), Philip (Hubert Burton), Mrs Elton (Marion Bailey)

“I promised faithfully I’d never tell a living soul!” Mrs Elton says, then spills the beans and reveals that Hester’s name is really Mrs Collyer not Mrs Page. She saw her ration book … 1952, we still had them (I remember when sweets came off the ration). She is separated from high court judge, Sir William Collyer.  Ann persuades Philip to phone him.  

Philip: Your wife has been concerned in … in an accident … Well, It’s rather difficult to tell you  that over the telephone … Well, If you insist. (Quickly) Gas poisoning and an overdose of drugs.  

Beautifully timed here. The underlined words are additions to the text. It always gets a laugh. I forget when reading about the play, or looking at the text, how often the lines on stage get a kind of graveyard laugh. Rattigan has that timing built in.

Mrs Elton praises Mr Miller who is so helpful with her unseen and sick husband. Miller (Nick Fletcher) emerges. He has a German accent. Dr Miller is a philosophical cove, here rather scruffier and more unshaven than in other versions.

Helen McCrory as Hester Collyer

Hester comes out of the bedroom, seeking a cigarette. She retrieves the note and puts it in her dressing gown pocket. Philip admits that he has phoned Sir William (and annoys her by addressing her as Lady Collyer). They leave her alone to contemplate, to dramatic electronic humming music.

Mrs Elton asks her why she did it:

Hester: Sometimes when you’re caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, the deep blue sea seems terribly inviting. It did last night.

We also discover that Hester and Fredddie are a month behind with the rent. Knock knock … Sir William has arrived. Not only is Peter Sullivan younger than often portrayed, but also more charismatic (and more handsome).

Peter Sullivan as Sir William Collyer

Hester had left her husband for a passionate affair with Freddie Page, an ex-Spitfire pilot who had fought in the Battle of Britain. They fled to Canada but Freddie lost his job as a pilot because he’s a drunk. Sir William did not know she had returned. They reminisce.  She tells him that she realizes she loves Page, but that he cannot respond. 

Miller arrives to check on her. This is fascinating. Here, I got the impression that Miller had known exactly who Collyer is as a judge. In his turn, Sir William questions his qualifications. We find Miller was interned on the Isle of Man in 1938.

Hester shows  Sir William her latest painting and he offers to buy it. She offers it to him, and he wishes her a happy birthday. He says he will collect the painting at 5 p.m. I’m looking on screen in sections to review (as with DVDs … something I’ve never done with plays) and I have the text. There are many tiny cuts … as here, where they re-negotiate 5.20 p.m. in the text. Cut. And why not?

short jacket, jeans with turn-ups? I thought Tom Burke’s costume actively undermined his characterisation

Freddie returns to the flat with his golf clubs.  In this National version, I thought Freddie’s costume a disaster. Jeans with turn-ups and a red blouson jacket? The man is a golfer and frequenter of casinos and gentleman’s clubs. It looks six or seven years at least later than the 1952 setting. I’m certain that the costume will have been well-researched and so will have existed at the time, but it just rang “WRONG” to me for the role. I can’t see golf clubs allowing jeans. These are places that measure the length of acceptable socks to the millimetre.  As great fans of The Musketeers TV series, Tom Burke’s presence was why we thought of going to see it in 2016.

Anyway, Freddie’s won some money … £7.  She asks him for some for the rent. He throws her £3. He needs the rest for his lunch in the Ritz. He realizes that he had forgotten her birthday with the special dinner she had cooked. It develops into a passionate embrace against the wall. She is pathetically pleased with his drunken attention.

More passionate than in other versions

This is the traditional Act break, filled here with more overt sexual attraction to doo-wop in the distance.  Freddie has run out of cigarettes and she says there are some in her dressing gown pocket. He picks it up and finds the suicide note. He reads it.

Cue loud electronic music  with wailing, and lights and movement on the stairwells behind. Heavy rainfall. (Fortunately off!)

(The text Act 2 runs straight on)

Lights up on Freddie and his pal, Jackie Jackson in the flat. Freddie is complaining that the fuss over forgetting her birthday is ridiculous. Freddie’s a chap who ‘wrote off three Spits by forgetting to put his ruddy undercart down.’ They appear to be a pair of obnoxious dickheads … on his earlier arrival Freddie had boasted that they’d done 93 mph in Jackie’s (extremely expensive) Alvis on the Great West Road. This was why they introduced speed limits! Freddie is hitting the bottle. And Tom Burke does a first-rate drunk. Jackie doesn’t want to read the note, but gets it read to him aloud anyway. It’s also a marvellous piece of cracking voice emotion. Hester turns up demanding the return of the letter. She rips it up. She wants to get rid of them before Sir William returns. She goes to wrap the picture, while Freddie explains to Jackie that he hates any emotional commitment, or scenes. Miller comes in and Freddie gives him a drink and wants to discuss the issue with him as well. Again, there are those little lines that get laughs, even better when delivered with utter nervous sincerity by Nick Fletcher as Miller.

Freddie: What’s behind the facts is me.
Miller: I imagine so.
Freddie: Little murdering me. All right. What would you do about it if you were me?
Miller: That’s a stupid question. Nature has not endowed me with the capacity for inspiring suicidal love.

Jackie and Freddie leave. On exiting, Freddie borrows a shilling, slams it down on a side table and tells her:

Freddie: Just in case I’m late for dinner.

She begs Miller to follow Freddie, fearing he’s on a bender. At that point, William arrives. They discuss Freddie- he had only started drinking when he went off with Hester.

She explains that Freddie can’t adjust to the humdrum of everyday life, and how their affair started.

Hester: His life stopped in 1940. He loved 1940, you know.

This is the long key dialogue where they explore love and lust and how and why she went off with Freddie. The discussion is a post-mortem of it all until Freddie arrives, Freddie locks himself in the bedroom. William exits. Hester sits with the record player, listening to The Flamingos I Only Have Eyes For You. (Auto-changer 1952?)

My love must be a kind of blind love
I can’t see anyone but you.

Freddie has got dressed up in a suit. He’s meeting a man about a job in South America.  The song plays, another tight embrace. Then we get the perfect 1952 woman touch … Your shoes need a clean. (I’ll add we’re currently watching the Mrs America TV series).

Freddie is leaving Hester to take the job in South America. He will be going alone. She begs him to stay. He’s off:

Hester: Freddie! Don’t leave me alone tonight!

THE INTERVAL

Loud music in the dark again. Long phone call for Freddie about golf. She takes the message. In and out the gauzy bedroom. Then staring at the shilling. She’s back in the dressing gown and petticoat. Mrs Elton and Ann turn up. Ann announces that Philip has stayed drinking with Mr Page, who met them in a restaurant. Freddie persuaded Philip to go with him to a new club. Ann’s pregnant and smoking – more very 1952.

Miller pops in and afterwards Mrs Elton explains that he was in bad trouble once and that he used to be a doctor. It was in all the papers and he went to jail. He now works every night, unpaid, in a hospital for infantile paralysis. It had been his speciality. He was working on a treatment. It’s always the intriguing question. What did he do? It was “shameful” too.

Mrs Elton: What he did wasn’t, well … the sort of thing people forgive very easily. Ordinary, normal people, I mean.
Hester: But you’ve forgiven him, Mrs Elton.
Mrs Elton: Well, I see far too much of life in this place to get upset about that sort of thing. Takes all sorts to make a world after all.

There is always speculation and some critics “know” it was abortion, or connected with children. This time, I’m sure Rattigan meant it was a homosexual act … Mrs Elton is expressing the writer’s opinion. Miller comes back to check on Hester.

Nick Fletcher as Mr Miller. He says, “I may not be a respectable tenant” – another line that evoked laughter from its carefully weighted hesitant delivery.

Miller advises her to “go on living.”

William comes with a note dropped through his letter box. It’s from Freddie. He has gone. Sir William reads it:

Sir William: I rather like this phrase … Sorry to have caused so much bother. What a nice ring of RAF understatement about it.

William makes a tentative suggestion that she could return to him.

He makes it more strongly. She declines and he cannot believe she won’t accept it.  They stick to Rattigan’s stage direction, as I keep saying, it’s all in the text:

(COLLYER puts his arms around HESTER and kisses her. She does not try to prevent him, but in no way responds. After a moment he releases her)
Hester: You see, Bill, I’m no longer the same person.

He goes. Philip lets himself in with Freddie’s key. He’s been sent to collect Freddie’s suitcase. He starts a long story about an infatuation he had with “an actress.” She was “not the right type.”

Hester: It really is very kind of you to give me this advice, Mr Welch. I’m very grateful

Another line that got a laugh from its ultra-polite studied insincerity. Philip lets slip where Freddie is staying, and she locks the door and takes the key.

Hester: Please sit down. This is a splendid opportunity for resuming your study of human nature!

She phones the hotel and pleads with him. Freddie rings off. Philip leaves. He is a total prat. She locks the door on both locks and finds the shilling and puts it in the meter. The door knocks, I Only Have Eyes For You plays again. She switches off lights, closes the windows, blocks the bottom of the door. She gets the sleeping pills. Gets a blanket and sits by the fire weeping.

Miller is at the door. She stands and lets him in. He susses the situation … he had seen her put the rug under the door – you should switch off the lights before doing so. He expresses the reality. Freddie will never return to her.

Mr Miller and Hester

This is a great dialogue. He explains that she must find a reason for living for herself, not for anyone else.

A drunken Freddie turns up. He explains that he’s off to Rio. She says she will go to art school.

Rattigan virtually repeats that instruction:

FREDDIE kisses HESTER. She accepts the embrace without in any way returning it … After a moment he releases her

We do not know until the last seconds of the play whether Hester will live or take her life. The ending is done differently to normal, but to the same effect.

Dan Rebellato, An Introduction to The Deep Blue Sea article is required further reading, He quotes the Observer review on Hester from 1952:

Perhaps she just needs a good slap.

Different times.

REACTION

The Deep Blue Sea is strongly in my memory from Chichester last year. The National Theatre 2016 production was highly acclaimed, as was Chichester 2019. I got out French’s Acting edition this morning. The original directions and set plan are highly detailed … ridiculously detailed in fact. I glanced at a few pages, and noted that there were judicious text cuts right away.

To me, the play seems to come out much the same (and very well) in different productions, which is why Rattigan and Coward were masters of the ‘well-made play.’ Hester is a great role for any actress.

There are variables. Mr Miller, the German accented struck-off doctor, can be played for sympathy or for laughs … in the Bath Theatre Royal production with Greta Saatchi in 2008, Mr Miller got a lot of laughs.

In both recent productions, Sir William Collyer is younger and more sympathetic than the cliché of a stiff upper lip pompous judge. They’re both right too, as Rattigan undoubtedly intended. Rattigan saw himself in Collyer’s situation. The character needs appeal … Peter Sullivan is very good here.

Then there’s the degree to which Hester’s lover, the Battle of Britain pilot, Freddie Page, is a stereotypical 1940 pilot. Both the National and Chichester chose to cast Jackie, his fellow 1940 hero, with a BAME actor. I can see why, but it means you don’t get the full Flying Officer Kite stereotype. Rattigan was an RAF air-gunner himself, and the author of Flare Path knew the type. If you make Jackie too stereotypical though, it leans into playing him for laughs, and that detracts from the play.

The Hester / Freddie interaction is more overtly sensual in this production.

 

Then we get the Lyttelton stage. It’s a hugely wide proscenium.

 

Sir William (Peter Sullivan) and Hester (Helen McCrory). Social distancing is no problem on that wide Lyttelton stage.

The cast can follow social distancing with ease. It seats 890, and boasts no pillars or awkward sidelines. True. You can see that great wide stage well, but it’s also curiously uninvolving if you’re in the balcony, and unless you’re a member and get Priority Booking, that’s where you’ will be. The theatre feels vast from up there. That’s why a streamed production has positive advantages in getting close enough to see expressions.

The width and height predicate large and elaborate sets. Here they go for the full height with gauze revealing the stairs and other apartments in the ‘large and gloomy Victorian mansion, converted to flats after World War One’ (Rattigan’s stage direction note). Bath Theatre Royal did this on a smaller scale in 2008. Rattigan states that the kitchen area is stage right and has an entrance. Bath and Chichester followed him. The National, daringly (!) moves the kitchen to an open area stage left. Not a big deal.

Chichester’s Minerva has the audience on three sides, with steeply raked seating. It holds 310. You’re up close to the action in any seat. The set is on the fourth side. It’s almost my favourite theatre in the country  except … the downside being that the seat space is too tight and I have been very uncomfortable in some seats – it’s great in the front row or on an aisle. Actors have told me that it’s one of the very best stages to work on.

There’s no question that the theatrical space at the Minerva greatly enhanced and benefitted The Deep Blue Sea. It’s a play of intimate conversations, close ups, angst. It suits old-fashioned TV, not technicolour Todd-AO super widescreen … which is the shape of that distant Lyttelton stage. In 2016, we chose to skip the National Theatre production partly because I thought the Lyttelton was the wrong space for the play. It is. The other reason for skipping it was that we weren’t members then and back rows of the balcony is something we’ve done and not enjoyed.

For me, while both productions are acting masterclasses, the Chichester production wins hands down in every aspect. You were so close, so involved (I think we were in the second row and on the aisle, so perfect).

This brings up the question of what will happen with theatres. The National will be a survivor. First, it is the NATIONAL and second it’s large, has huge lobby areas, plenty of large loos. On the other hand, the National often annoys me. It hoovers up an unfair proportion of money and spends it extravagantly.  It does have these huge sets, and it does go for unnecessary extras. You don’t need any extras in The Deep Blue Sea whatsoever, but they had six of them bustling about on the stairs behind the gauzes. The excuse will be that they need understudies and might as well involve them. Luxury!  In 2021, it will be seen as madness.

I fear that a copy of Jerzy Grotowski’s Towards A Poor Theatre might be required reading next year.

STREAMING AND SOUND

We watched it on a large screen with full 5.1 surround and dialogue sounded brittle and echoey … and not that clear. I checked through on the iMac the next morning, and it sounded much less brittle. The same with One Man Two Guv’nors. Odd.

MY RATING

It’s unfair to compare the streaming experience with live theatre. If we’d been there in 2016 and in seats reasonably far forward, ****
As an experience of the play, I preferred Chichester, so as a TV experience, ***

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID

5 star
Matt Trueman, What’s On Stage *****

This is a revelatory revision of a classic; a feminist reading that proves Rattigan was miles and miles ahead of his time. Essential.

The London Theatre co online *****

4 star
Michael Billington, Guardian ****

Fortunately, it gets an impassioned production by Carrie Cracknell that illuminates Rattigan’s psychological understanding and boasts a shining performance from Helen McCrory, its only blemish is an intrusive sound score that suggests the characters are living not in west London in the 1950s but on the edge of Krakatoa during its eruption in the 1880s.

Susannah Clapp, The Observer ****

 McCrory does not miss a beat. She has the poise of the establishment wife: irony and steel in place just when you expect her to break. She has the abandon of the unhappy lover. Though heavy hearted, she moves like a feather. She turns the closing moments into an episode of surprising gusto after grief. She reclaims herself.

Natasha Tripney, The Stage ****

Carrie Cracknell – who previously directed McCrory in Medea for the National – makes the most of the Lyttelton Theatre’s width and height. Designer Tom Scutt has created a two-storey rooming house on the stage, the walls of which are translucent, conveying a real sense of lives lived on top of one another, a background London hum. … But the production itself feels rather uncertain at times. There are moments of ghosting, figures glimpsed through doors to the haunting strains of The Flamingos’ I Only Have Eyes for You. In these moments it feels like Cracknell is attempting something more conceptual, but they never really build up to anything.

Ben Lawrence, The Telegraph ****
Michael Arditti, The Express ****
Ben Dowell, Radio Times ****

3 star
Paul Taylor, The Independent ***

McCrory has the air of a smoky-voiced upper-class bohemian, who could make herself at home anywhere. The tension between the heroine and her reduced circumstances is, to my mind, further lessened, by Tom Scutt’s set with its translucent walls that allow us ghostly glimpses of other lives in this massive, heaped-up house to the accompaniment of ominous movie music. I can appreciate the rationale for this while feeling that it backfires in its distracting overkill.

LINKS ON THIS BLOG

CARRIE CRACKNELL
Medea by Euripides, National Theatre Live 2014

HELEN McCRORY
Medea by Euripides, National Theatre Live 2014

TOM BURKE
Don Carlos, by Schiller, Nuffield City Theatre 2018

NICK FLETCHER
For Services Rendered, Somerset Maugham, Chichester Minerva

YOLANDA KETTLE
For Services Rendered, Somerset Maugham, Chichester Minerva
Plenty by David Hare, Chichester Festival Theatre 2019

HUBERT BURTON
She Stoops to Conquer, Bath Theatre Royal (Marlowe)

TERENCE RATTIGAN PLAYS ON THIS BLOG:
All On Her Own by Terence Rattigan, Kenneth Branagh Company 2015
Flare Path, by Terence Rattigan, 2015 Tour, at Salisbury Playhouse
Harlequinade by Terence Rattigan, Kenneth Branagh Company 2015
Ross  by Terence Rattigan, Chichester Festival Theatre 2016
Separate Tables by Terence Rattigan, Salisbury Playhouse
While The Sun Shines by Terence Rattigan, Bath, 2016
French Without Tears, by Terence Rattigan, English Touring Theatre 2016
The Deep Blue Sea by Terence Rattigan (FILM VERSION)
The Deep Blue Sea by Terence Rattigan, Chichester Minerva, 2019
The Deep Blue Sea by Terence Rattigan, National 2016, NT Live 2020

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