After the whirling excitement of her production of A Doll’s House, I half-expected Carrie Cracknell to let rip at Terence Rattigan. That is not quite what she does in The Deep Blue Sea. Instead, she plants a gunpowder trail. The painful realism of the play is encased in strangeness. In an indelible performance, Helen McCrory is buffeted, wretched, plaintive, strung-along, strung-up, manipulative. All the things a 21st-century woman does not want to be. Yet she makes of Hester Collyer a remarkable and unexpected heroine.
Collyer is the woman stretched out in front of an unlit gas fire at the beginning of the play, who by the end may be peeping out towards a new life. The cause of her suicidal grief is her emotionally numbed lover, Freddie, for whom she has left her prosperous, affectionate husband. Rattigan is very good on unequal love. If he doesn’t love you as you love him, what do you get from him? Hester is asked. “Himself,” she replies. It is also strong on the reasons for this numbness. It is 1952. Freddie was a pilot in the war. He has left his vitality in the sky.
Lofty, echoing and painted a dull aquamarine, Tom Scutt’s design makes the lodging house in (then unfashionable) Ladbroke Grove look as if it has been sunk underwater. In the deep blue sea. Suspended. As is Hester’s life. Above and around her room, people are dimly seen, like ghosts, behind screens.
McCrory is in a different league from everyone else on stage. Tom Burke, as the lover, transmits a sense of damage but little of danger. The exchanges between Hubert Burton and Yolanda Kettle as the young and conventional neighbours are starchy without seeming in period. 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.
In 1952, an unmarried woman living with her lover was “living in sin”. Suicide was illegal, as was homosexuality: the play expresses some of Rattigan’s own experience. Cracknell’s production shows Rattigan as an inheritor of Ibsen’s mantle, a visionary about the circumstances that imprison people.
