OVERVIEW

When you’re caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, the deep blue sea can sometimes look very inviting, according to the heroine of Terence Rattigan’s 1952 study of obsession and the destructive power of love.

In this powerful drama of passion versus loyalty, Hester Collyer, the daughter of a clergyman and wife of a judge is foundering in the closing stages of a hopeless affair.

Freddie Page, her lover, a handsome but shallow ex-Battle of Britain pilot, is out of his depth in their relationship, overwhelmed by the strength of an emotion he is incapable of reciprocating.

cast

Greta Scacchi

Simon Williams

Creative Team

Author:	Terrance Rattigan
Director:	Ed Hall
Producer:	Theatre Royal Bath, Nica Burns & Max Weitzenhoffer for Nimax Theatres
Press:	Arthur Leone PR (Peter Leone)

TICKET PRICES

Stalls:	£46, £41, £36, £21
Dress Circle:	£46, £41, £21
Upper Circle:	£36, £26, £21
Boxes:	£41

Concessions
£21 available 1 hour prior to curtain up and available in advance for Thursday matinee (subject to availability)

Groups
For groups of 10+ £15 off top three prices for all performances except Friday & Saturdays (subject to availability)

School Rates
£35, £25, £20 tickets priced at £15 Subject to availability on Monday to Thursday performances.

All prices include a £1 restoration levy.

Performances

From 29th April 2008 to 19th July 2008
Monday to Saturday at 7.30pm
Wednesday & Saturday at 2.30pm

First Midweek Matinee: Wednesday 30th April 2008 @ 2.30pm
First Weekend Matinee: Saturday 5th May 2008 @ 2.30pm

Press Reviews

Daily Telegraph 10th March 2008

The Deep Blue Sea: Swept away on an ocean of bitter tears

Charles Spencer reviews The Deep Blue Sea at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford

There have been more momentous plays, like Osborne's Look Back in Anger, more influential plays, like Pinter's The Birthday Party, more intelligent, elegant and entertaining plays, like Stoppard's Arcadia.
Yet for my money, the greatest and most moving British drama since the Second World War is Terence Rattigan's The Deep Blue Sea (1952).

The playwright directs his scorn at people too self-absorbed to notice someone in their midst is trying to kill themselves.

The comedy is launched in the hideously decorated, lower-middle class kitchen of Jane and Sidney Hopcraft, an upwardly-mobile couple in trade who are all of aquiver over the arrival of their socially superior friends.

As well as its overpowering emotional impact, this apparently small-scale domestic piece also offers an evocative picture of down-at-heel Britain in the early Fifties, and a potent account of the reserve and decency that were once such a strong part of the national character.

The action is set in a shabby apartment in Notting Hill, and in a memorably dramatic opening scene the heroine, Hester Collyer, is discovered one morning, apparently dead, in front of the gas fire. She has tried to kill herself for love, recognising that her younger lover, Freddie, cannot return her passion.

She comes round from the gas and aspirin, however, and the play follows her through the rest of the day, during which we meet Freddie himself, a decorated flying ace in the Second World War who cannot adapt to the peace; Hester's husband, a distinguished judge who still loves her; a disgraced, struck-off doctor who becomes Hester's confidant, and some of her neighbours in the run-down lodging house.

Almost by stealth, the piece becomes a state-of-the-nation drama.

But it is as a study of the cruel inequality of passion that the play works most powerfully. Rattigan was inspired to write The Deep Blue Sea by the suicide of a former male lover, and some have accused him of cowardice in not making this an explicitly gay play.

In fact, Rattigan's rare empathy for those utterly unlike himself has long struck me as his greatest gift as a dramatist.

And his portrait of Hester, a respectable clergyman's daughter who in married middle-age has suddenly discovered a great well of desire for a younger man, proves both extraordinarily moving and, for the period, daringly frank.

Greta Scacchi, an actress I confess I have previously regarded as little more than eye candy, is a revelation in a role (originally played by Peggy Ashcroft) that demands acting of the highest order.

At first, Hester attempts to conceal the depths of her anguish and shame with polite upper-middle-class platitudes, but Scacchi never leaves any doubt of just how much such small talk is costing her.

Her sudden electrifying surge of desire for Freddie is almost frightening in its intensity, while her abandoned grief when he leaves her has a raw intensity that brings stinging tears to the eyes.

Edward Hall's production, with its seedily atmospheric design by Francis O'Connor, is also blessed with fine supporting performances.

Dugald Bruce-Lockhart not only captures the callowness of Freddie, with his boozing and his RAF slang, but also the pain of a basically decent man who cannot understand the emotional morass in which he finds himself.

Simon Williams has rarely been better than as Hester's dignified, grief-stricken husband who tries in vain to persuade her to return home; and there is a beautiful performance from Tim McMullan as the disgraced doctor who persuades Hester that the real courage in life is to go on living when all hope has gone.

There will be no justice if this outstanding production of a modern masterpiece doesn't wind up in the West End.

Independent on Sunday 16th March 2008

In Terence Rattigan's 1952 classic, The Deep Blue Sea, Greta Scacchi's Hester outwardly tries to maintain an old-fashioned stiff upper lip while being, privately, on the skids and suicidal. She has quit her respectable marriage for a doomed passionate affair.

Scacchi is only sporadically harrowing. Still, Edward Hall's production, set in a mournfully seedy boarding house, boasts fine and touching performances from Simon Williams as Hester's stiff-backed but tender husband, from Dugald Bruce-Lockhart as Freddie, the wag, and from Tim McMullan as the struck-off doctor from upstairs – a creepy cynic or a strange guardian angel?

Kate Bassett

The Times 11th March 2008

It was inspired by the suicide of the gay playwright's male ex-lover, but Terence Rattigan's searing 1952 drama centres on an enthralling heroine. Hester Collyer is caught between postwar society's strictures and passion, between sordid self-destruction and miserable life, and between her wealthy, successful husband and her feckless, penniless young lover. The daughter of a clergyman, married, not unhappily but without fire or force of feeling, to a member of the judiciary, she is judged on every side, not least by herself, as she sacrifices herself for a love she knows will never be returned.

The repressive English morality and the stiff-lipped code of conduct that Hester defies may have slackened since Rattigan wrote the play. But the transgressive shock of Hester's attempted suicide, the incredulity with which it is met and the flagrant, all-consuming ferocity of her feelings remain shatteringly powerful in this fine revival, directed by Edward Hall and starring an incandescent Greta Scacchi.

Watching Scacchi inhabit the character is an almost uncomfortably intense experience. First we see her, a limp rag doll, unceremoniously carried from the dilapidated room where her effort to gas herself has failed purely because the money in the meter ran out.

With her fallen hero lover, the ex-RAF pilot Freddie Page (Dugald Bruce-Lockhart), she is mingled agony and ecstasy, shuddering with desire under his touch, performing a playful striptease before tossing her silk slip to him, yet gulping down the bitter knowledge that her utter devotion is met only by fondness. She is dignified gentility with her landlady and with her gossiping, rubbernecking neighbours, and aching regret with Simon Williams as her patrician husband. But it's when she's alone, gasping and choking on her sobs and crawling in despair on the floor, that Scacchi reveals the depths of Hester's humiliating, hopeless suffering.

It's a great merit of Hall's production that she is not the only one in pain. Bruce-Lockhart's Page is horrifyingly cruel, flinging Hester's obsession back in her face with sadistic, drunken sarcasm; but he's also self-loathing, appalled by the damage his inability to connect emotionally causes him to inflict and rudderless in a civilian world for which his wartime heroics have not equipped him.

Williams, too, catches the quiet despair and compassion of Collyer; and the dry wit of Tim McMullan's struck-off Middle European doctor, Miller, is obviously a defence against the resurgence of haunting memories that give him an instinctive if tersely expressed sympathy for Hester. The struggle of these unhappy people to make their compromised lives liveable is brutal yet humane, as timelessly recognisable as it is riveting.

Sam Marlowe

Greta: Doomed affair helped resurrect my career
Evening Standard 31.03.08

Cathartic experience: Greta Scacchi with Dugald Bruce Lockhart in The Deep Blue Sea

Greta Scacchi has drawn on the heartbreak that poleaxed her career to play the role of a lifetime. The star of films such as White Mischief is to transfer to the West End in Terence Rattigan's searing drama The Deep Blue Sea after a hit UK tour.

The 48-year-old actress revealed that the part of Hester Collyer, an Establishment wife who throws it all away for a doomed love, mirrored her own life, and had proved cathartic.
Scacchi broke up with American actor Vincent D'Onofrio not long after they had her first child in 1992. The split left her so distraught she was unable to work for four years — just when her Hollywood career was taking off.

She was forced to resurrect those emotions in rehearsals with director Edward Hall for what proved to be a triumphant run in the regions.
Scacchi said: “With Rattigan, the convention is you keep a stiff upper lip and nobody shows any emotion.

“But he [Hall] got us to really plumb the depths of these emotions and use our own stories. It was quite a cathartic experience."

“I felt I had reawakened stuff in my own situation of overwhelming sexual passion that was unrequited. It was very, very painful and quite scarring.”

The Italian-born actress was “madly, impossibly, in love” with D'Onofrio, the star of Stanley Kubrick's Vietnam movie Full Metal Jacket. But “it ended in tears” when their daughter, Leila, was only six months old.

“It was a real struggle,” she said. “I got caught up in this relationship that was going to leave me quite incapable of working for a few years — four years of trauma. It shot my career in the foot.
“Now I feel quite triumphant. I have found a way to be glad that I had such heartbreak.

“I know something about wretchedness, which is the feeling Hester has. There were a lot of lines I couldn't have put better myself, I had more to give you, much more than you ever wanted from me.' It was so close to the bone. What I realised was I thought it was about me, though ladies I've met in the provinces who grab my arm say it's their story too.” She has received dozens of letters and rave reviews that she hopes will boost her career — she felt her good looks meant she was never taken seriously by British theatre.

“It's been a bit of a struggle to get accepted... but I feel there's hope now,” said Scacchi. “This is the biggest and best role I've ever had. Peggy Ashcroft said it was the most demanding role she had ever played. But it's very satisfying — maybe it's the chance for me to prove I have the qualifications.” She said she was now overweight and not as attractive as in her youth but was “happily settled” in West Sussex with her husband — and first cousin — Carlo Mantegazza, with whom she has a son, Matteo.

The Deep Blue Sea was inspired by Rattigan's relationship with a younger man but because homosexuality was illegal in 1952, the playwright created the character of Hester to tell the story. The Deep Blue Sea is at the Vaudeville Theatre from 29 April to 19 July

By Louise Jury