February 9, 2011
The Deep Blue Sea is one of Terence Rattigan's most personal plays. A psycho-drama of unrequited love set in the early 1950s, it focuses on Hester Collyer (Fay Lomas), a deeply unhappy married woman who leaves her husband Sir William (Bobby Leigh-Pemberton) and sets up home with Freddie Page (Thomas Olver) in search of a better life. Alas this proves a pipedream - although Freddie cares for her, he possesses neither the mental capacity nor the moral strength to understand her. He can only perceive her through his limited social prism dominated by drinking with his cronies, ex-RAF types rendered aimless by peacetime.
Hester has resemblances to the closet-gay Rattigan himself, wanting to be loved yet always finding unsuitable partners. Socially she is in limbo, having given up respectability as the wife of a judge; of her love with Freddy, not only dare she not mention the name, but also her address.When the unsentimental, disgraced ex-Dr Miller (a brisk Rory Platt), her rooming-house neighbour, revives her after a bout of depression, she feels the stirrings of kinship not just from fellow-feeling with another lame duck but because this is first real human interest shown her in an age.
This Trinity Players’ production for Rattigan’s centenary before a sparse first-night audience of 25 no doubt wishes to rescue the play from its relative present obscurity, but its case is presented rather than urged. The cheap flat is sparsely furnished with red sofa and armchair and the visual impact is minimal; in fact I found myself thinking the piece might go better as a radio play. In any case, everything depends on the actors.
Fay Lomas’s Hester was a one-note performance; her curt, clipped tones in her scenes with her husband and lover robbed them of emotional force. Did two red-blooded chaps really do battle for these anodyne affections? Bobby Leigh-Pemberton’s judge of a husband, on the other hand, had a pleasing bass voice and such a sympathetic bedside manner that one wondered at the perversity of Hester ditching this paragon for her feckless pilot. One of the oddities of the production was that while we were constantly told of Freddie’s drinking feats and actually saw him empty a bottle of scotch in the time it takes to boil an egg, Thomas Olver made no attempt to play him as a drunk and seemed always as sober as a, er, judge.........
One final thing: am I being ridiculously PC if I deplore the cast’s lighting up and filling this tiny, airless theatre space with cigarette smoke? I’m sure Rattigan’s stage directions call for it, but even so....
Hester has resemblances to the closet-gay Rattigan himself, wanting to be loved yet always finding unsuitable partners. Socially she is in limbo, having given up respectability as the wife of a judge; of her love with Freddy, not only dare she not mention the name, but also her address.When the unsentimental, disgraced ex-Dr Miller (a brisk Rory Platt), her rooming-house neighbour, revives her after a bout of depression, she feels the stirrings of kinship not just from fellow-feeling with another lame duck but because this is first real human interest shown her in an age.
This Trinity Players’ production for Rattigan’s centenary before a sparse first-night audience of 25 no doubt wishes to rescue the play from its relative present obscurity, but its case is presented rather than urged. The cheap flat is sparsely furnished with red sofa and armchair and the visual impact is minimal; in fact I found myself thinking the piece might go better as a radio play. In any case, everything depends on the actors.
Fay Lomas’s Hester was a one-note performance; her curt, clipped tones in her scenes with her husband and lover robbed them of emotional force. Did two red-blooded chaps really do battle for these anodyne affections? Bobby Leigh-Pemberton’s judge of a husband, on the other hand, had a pleasing bass voice and such a sympathetic bedside manner that one wondered at the perversity of Hester ditching this paragon for her feckless pilot. One of the oddities of the production was that while we were constantly told of Freddie’s drinking feats and actually saw him empty a bottle of scotch in the time it takes to boil an egg, Thomas Olver made no attempt to play him as a drunk and seemed always as sober as a, er, judge.........
One final thing: am I being ridiculously PC if I deplore the cast’s lighting up and filling this tiny, airless theatre space with cigarette smoke? I’m sure Rattigan’s stage directions call for it, but even so....