The Trauma of Love & Loss: NT’s ‘The Deep Blue Sea’
- harrypd21
- Sep 3, 2016
- 2 min read
Updated: Jun 28, 2019
Carrie Cracknell’s NT production of Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea is both a tense unravelling of timeless themes and yet another perfect vehicle to accentuate Helen McCrory’s mastery of her art.
McCrory, you might recognise her from the National Theatre’s Medea or perhaps as Aunt Poll in the Beeb’s hit series Peaky Blinders, plays Hester Collyer – a recent suicide attemptee and “delinquent” living with a younger man whilst still married to her estranged husband. The bitter ironies, and autobiographical similarities, in both transgressive sexual affairs and the act of suicide itself being illegal in Rattigan’s 1950s, wherein the play is also set, are far from obscured.
Tom Scutt and Guy Hoare’s efforts on the ambience of the play see the curtains open only a dully lit apartment created from deep turquoise hues that instantly feel both like the deep and the constant crushing tint of depression. An interesting addition is the use of multiple screens as partitions, and the visibility of a stairwell and the apartments on the next floor whereby bodies can be seen stalking – coming and going and, in Cracknell’s words, listening; spying, adding to Hester’s paranoia. It is reminiscent in look of how a Tennessee William’s tenement might be presented in 1950s Ladbroke Grove and is accentuated with beautiful period detail and costumes.
A strong supporting cast full of deluded bystanders and friends or acquaintances who don’t really want to be involved, caught just on the fringes, is most notably headed up by Peter Sullivan’s stoic Judge Collyer (the ex-) with his stiff-upper-lip views of marriage for show; and by a fantastic turn from Tom Burke as Freddie Page – the ex-RAF pilot who has thrown in better days as a somebody in the war for the bottom of a bottle, never quite realising the complexity of Hester’s love for him, nor wanting to. Burke reels around the stage, always in varying levels of intoxication, and spews “tally-ho chums” RAF-speak as he both manipulatives and wilts under McCrory.
As to the main event, it would be an understatement to say that McCrory steals the show – with 100% stage time, she is indeed The Deep Blue Sea and all the best things it has to offer. Both as the main character to whom everything happens and, as I may hazard to guess, in herself offering (or with the help of a director previously worked with) a tempestuous performance that engenders the most timeless things Rattigan’s source material has to say – bringing, I believe, more to the source material in her performance than it alone first suggests. McCrory, diminutive beside her leading men both physically and in terms of control, appears to have worked her sinewy body into a constant, shaking, energy beneath her silk slip, at once exploding from crying and sobbing to composing herself for visitors, and even laughing and playing gay.
McCrory, within the space of two-and-a-half hours, treats themes of love and lust like madness, like loss and mental illness – bargaining, denying, collapsing and building herself back up again with an insight into the human conditions, to nuances, that is tragically real.
The Deep Blue Sea is playing now at the National Theatre.
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