Theatre Review: The Deep Blue Sea (National Theatre)

When Terence Davies directed his much-anticipated but ultimately disappointing film adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s 1952 play The Deep Blue Sea in 2011, he commented that he cast Rachel Weisz in the role of Hester Collyer because there was simply no other British actress whom he could imagine playing the part. As it turned out, Weisz seemed too young and a bit lightweight in this particular role, leading some of us to speculate who might have proved a better choice. For me, one immediate candidate suggested herself: Helen McCrory, an actress whose superb body of work encompasses classical and contemporary drama, TV, film and stage.

     

McCrory now gets her chance to play Hester in Carrie Cracknell’s major revival of The Deep Blue Sea at the National Theatre. It’s not the first time that McCrory and Cracknell have collaborated: the pair delivered a stellar contemporary reworking of Medea at the NT two years ago. Their re-teaming on Rattigan’s text is more conventional, but none the worse for that, for the result is a beautiful, sensitive and measured production of one of the greatest, most emblematic pieces of 20th century British drama.

Since Karel Reisz’s Penelope Wilton-starring 1993 Almeida production revived interest in the play (and in Rattigan’s then-underrated drama more broadly) The Deep Blue Sea has established itself as Rattigan’s masterpiece, a work that insightfully explores the complexities of love through the experiences of a middle-class woman who, having left her husband for a younger man, attempts suicide as the new relationship sours. For all the drama’s intimacy – it unfolds entirely in the sitting room of Hester and Freddie’s shabby boarding house flat – the piece has its wider resonances. Indeed, Dan Rebellato, in his Introduction to the Nick Hern edition of the play, argues for The Deep Blue Sea as “a much broader, more social play, concerned with the pain suffered by those caught between their desires and a society which will not tolerate them” (xxi). (Mike Poulton’s new play, Kenny Morgan, currently at the Arcola Theatre, probes the real-life events that inspired the drama, one of several recent plays that have used  - or exploited - elements of Rattigan’s biography for dramatic purposes.)

Cracknell’s production attempts to give a sense of that wider social context, and of other lives unfolding around Hester’s. The ambient transition between Acts 1 and 2 (the production’s most self-conscious, dissonant moment) offers a glimpse into some of the other flats in the building. These elements feel half-baked, though, and could have been taken further; the large ensemble cast seems squandered. In addition, although Rattigan’s stage directions specify that the action takes place in “a big room”, designer Tom Scutt arguably overdoes it here with a spacious set, lit in melancholy, vaguely aquatic tones by Guy Hoare, that doesn’t quite help to convey the claustrophobia and entrapment of Hester’s predicament.

Helen McCrory in The Deep Blue Sea (Photo: Richard Hubert Smith)

McCrory’s performance conveys it, though. Her illuminating interpretation captures the character's clear-eyed assessment of her situation, her sexual passion for Freddie, and her deep despair. A calm surface conveying hidden depths, McCrory’s fiercely intelligent, economical delivery matches perfectly the beautiful restraint of Rattigan’s writing (listen to the way she inflects “Just my love” when asked if she has a message for Freddie). It also allows moments of heightened desperation to really resonate. Alongside some of the structural shifts and weak additions that messed with the dramatic tension of the material, part of the problem with Davies’s film version was that Weisz’s Hester seemed so much younger than her husband William (as played by Simon Russell Beale) that the transgressiveness of the character’s absconding with a younger man was considerably diminished. This isn’t a mistake that this production makes. Moreover, McCrory goes beyond the individual character to create an archetypal figure here: something similar to what Pedro Almodóvar, in his remarks about Cocteau’s La Voix Humaine, described as “a woman sitting next to a suitcaseful of memories, waiting miserably for a phone call from the man she loves” (Almodóvar on Almodóvar, p.80).

Though adept at indicating the way in which the character's frustrations at the direction of his life lead to his callous treatment of Hester, Tom Burke, as Freddie, might do more to suggest the charm and charisma that made Hester fall for him. The other performances are extremely well judged, however. McCrory’s scenes with Peter Sullivan, as the cuckolded William, are especially good, with awkwardness giving way to tenderness as the pair fall into reminiscence about their shared past.

The boarding house characters - variously offering moralistic judgement, advice, and practical help - are also vividly drawn. Yolanda Kettle and Hubert Burton are funny and touching as the well-meaning Welches, and Marion Bailey brings to the production the kind of wonderful naturalness she brought to another landlady character, Mrs. Booth, in Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner (2014). (This production is particularly good at suggesting a complicity between its three very different female characters.) As the mysterious Mr. Miller, Nick Fletcher hits just the right note of shrewd detachment and compassionate concern. Fletcher’s wrenching final scene with McCrory brings out the still-potent poignancy and wisdom of Rattigan’s humane vision, in which a lover may prove lethal but a near-stranger might be a saviour, in the end.

The Deep Blue Sea is booking at the National Theatre until 21 September.

Film Review: The Deep Blue Sea (Davies, 2011)

Terence Rattigan’s centenary has been commemorated by several major stagings of the playwright’s work this year - including London revivals of Flare Path and Cause Celebre, and an excellent season at Chichester which presented The Deep Blue Sea and The Browning Version alongside new plays inspired by Rattigan’s life and work.  Apart from a series of films and TV adaptations screened at BFI Southbank, cinema has been slower to celebrate Rattigan’s achievements, however, despite his close association with the medium throughout the 1940s and 50s. 

So the news that Terence Davies would be making his first fiction feature in eleven years with an adaptation of The Deep Blue Sea starring Rachel Weisz, Tom Hiddleston and Simon Russell Beale in the lead roles was a particular cause for celebration, especially for those of us who admire Rattigan and Davies just about equally. Unfortunately, though, and despite some striking and affecting individual moments, the meeting of Terry and Terry hasn’t quite resulted in the perfect marriage that might have been anticipated.

Along with The Browning Version and The Winslow Boy, The Deep Blue Sea is recognised as Rattigan’s most flawlessly-constructed work - the epitome of the “well-made play,” indeed - its water-tight three act structure presenting the final few hours in the affair between Hester Collyer and her younger ex-RAF lover Freddie as they play out in a shabby London boarding house.

Resisting the idea of “just photographing the play,” Davies has - unsurprisingly and justifiably - transformed that structure, developing a non-linear narrative that presents episodes from Hester’s past with Freddie (Hiddleston) and her husband William (Russell Beale) in counterpoint with her present situation, and that clearly reflects Davies’s own abiding concern with the workings of memory. (Unlike the play, the film presents the events entirely from Hester’s point-of-view.) Always strong on ambience, Davies evokes the drear of 1950s London with the feeling with which he conjured 50s Liverpool in Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992), Florian Hoffmeister’s misty, soft-focus cinematography and James Merifield's production design sustaining a distinctive - though not precisely pleasurable - oppressive mood. The opening is masterly: a nine-minute sequence scored to Samuel Barber’s gorgeously intense Violin Concerto that pans from the Ladbroke Grove street up the front of the boarding house to find Hester in the throes of her suicide attempt. Davies-land (milk bottles on the doorstep, sounds of “the wireless”) and Rattigan-land form a perfect synthesis here. And the ending - a beautifully-judged reverse of this sequence - is similarly strong.

It’s in the middle that things get a little sticky, at times. For it’s hard not to conclude that, in re-jigging the play’s structure, Davies has removed the material’s dramatic motor. The film drifts and dribbles, tension (and humour) dissipating in sequences that sometimes feel stilted and look posed. And the new scenes and characters that Davies has devised don’t, for the most part, seem like improvements upon those he’s excised. Especially ill-advised is a bogus early sequence - striving for bitchy wit and missing the target - that finds Hester facing off with her monstrous mummy-in-law (Barbara Jefford), the latter helpfully underlining the societal forces that Hester is up against when she intones “Beware of passion... It always leads to something ugly.” (The first part of that quote has become the film’s tagline.) As Hester’s parson pater the great Oliver Ford Davies is wasted in a similarly superfluous scene in which Hester seeks his counsel (in church! Wouldn’t he grant her an audience at home?) only to be rebuffed. Such moments seem, for Davies, atypically crass ways of ensuring audience sympathy with Hester, and emphasising the rebelliousness of her actions.

Elsewhere, the director’s movie-ardour leads him into a few unfortunate indulgences too, including a Blitz flashback that seems to express nothing more than the filmmaker’s pleasure at devising an elaborate tracking shot, and a Brief Encounter homage for Hester’s second suicide attempt. (It might have been more fun if Davies had had Hester and Freddie duck into an illicit matinee at one point - to watch Alec and Laura ducking into their illicit matinee in Brief Encounter, perhaps?)

There's a crucial piece of miscasting, too, I'd argue. Weisz's commitment to the role is evident in every scene, and she acquits herself admirably throughout. But even in her strongest moments here (such as a great final scene) her performance never completely transcends the fact that she seems about ten years too young for the role, an issue that, I think, does diminish our sense of Hester's transgressiveness in falling for Freddie in the first place. (“She looks younger than he does,” mused my companion at one point.) And the re-ordering of the scenes impacts upon the arc of the character: as Davies has re-arranged the material, Hester becomes more hysterical when Freddie storms out for the evening than she does when he announces that he’s leaving her for good.

Even though he’s been directed to overdo Freddie’s RAF-slang and his belligerence (especially in an over-pitched argument scene set in an art gallery), the engaging Hiddleston comes through with a good performance. Two pub singalong scenes - quintessential Davies moments, of course - turn out to be two of the finest innovations here, adding more to our sense of Freddie and Hester’s relationship than most of the new dialogue does.

And, playing William the cuckold, it’s great to see Simon Russell Beale in a decent screen role for once. Hester and William's scenes here may lack the deep sense of complicity and history that other actors have brought to them, but Russell Beale conveys William’s predicament with touching understatement. And Davies succeeds in bringing out the poignancy of this triangle, made up of three protagonists who all desire different kinds of love.

But apart from Harry Hadden-Paton, who’s likeable in an expanded role as Freddie’s friend Jackie Jackson, the supporting roles feel somewhat mismanaged. As Miller, Karl Johnson suffers the most from the cuts, his pivotal role - which, according to Davies, “no-one is convinced by” - reduced to a bit of disgruntled comic business. Ann Mitchell portrays the grimmest Mrs. Elton ever seen before being transformed into a sentimentalised salt-of-the-earth font-of-wisdom towards the end, replacing Miller as the person to shift Hester’s perspective on her situation with the pearl: “Suicide? No-one’s worth it.” (Now how about that as the movie’s tag-line?)

Davies’s two previous adaptations - the underrated The Neon Bible (1995) and the great The House of Mirth (2000) - seemed like pretty seamless, dynamic mergings of his highly distinctive sensibility and those of the creators of the novels. Here, in contrast, the director’s admirable but sometimes heavy-handed drive to cinematise Rattigan’s material proves less successful overall. There are, to be sure, many elements to admire in Davies’s Deep Blue Sea. But along the way a level of intensity seems to have gone missing.

Review: Terence Davies Lecture @ BFI Southbank (5/11/2011)

The appearance of a new film by Terence Davies is an event for many for us, though sadly an all too rare event, the British film industry being what it is. The highly anticipated release of The Deep Blue Sea at the end of the month (which you can barely pass a corner of the BFI without seeing a poster for at the moment; one has now appeared in the men’s toilets!) made Davies an especially appropriate choice to deliver this year’s Colin Young Emeritus Lecture at BFI Southbank. Named in honour of the first director of the National Film and Television School, this lecture series was initiated in 2007 and offers an opportunity for the speaker to reflect on film culture and education; previous presenters have included David Puttman and Nick Broomfield. Davies is, moreover, an alumnus of the NFTS where the second part in what would become the Davies Trilogy, Madonna and Child, was completed in 1980 as his graduation film.

As it turned out, though, this year’s lecture was really a lecture in name only. Rather, it was a selection of clips from a few favourite Davies movies -  The Pajama Game (1957), Gypsy (1962), Sweet Charity (1968), Oklahoma (1955), and - yup - Carry On Nurse (1959) - briefly introduced by the director and Roger Crittenden, and more in line with the BFI’s Screen Epiphanies strand than anything else. Davies began by talking with characteristic reverence about his formative cinema-going experiences, and the transcendence they offered him: “Even now I remember exactly where I sat, the route I took to the cinema…”

The film sequences shown were then loosely connected under the theme of “lost” performers: actors, dancers and singers who gave one memorable performance and then effectively disappeared. So we were treated to Paul Wallace hoofing it up in front of Natalie Wood in Gypsy and Reta Shaw and Eddie Foy Jr duetting to charming effect on "I'll Never Be Jealous Again" in The Pajama Game. Though this conceit didn’t really hold water for several of the featured performers (Charles Hawtrey? Gene Nelson? Really?), the clips themselves were an enjoyable compensation for the shaky premise, and Davies’s sheer unadulterated glee when introducing them (“This is SUBLIME!”) was infectious. Most enjoyable of all was the glorious “Steam Heat” sequence from The Pajama Game (and let’s get this marvellous Marxist musical back on a London stage soon!) and “You Gotta Get A Gimmick” from Gypsy, which sent Davies into transports of joy. The clips are here and here for your pleasure.

Always idiosyncratic, Davies’s idea of a lecture on film culture and education probably wasn’t what anyone - including, it would appear, Mr. Young himself - was anticipating. And more detailed commentary on the performers whose work he wished to highlight would have enhanced the presentation. Even so, this sharing of enthusiasms by our most ardently movie-loving auteur made for an entertaining evening.

Theatre Review: The Deep Blue Sea (Chichester Festival Theatre)

Following the recent London revivals of Flare Path and Cause Célébre, the focus of the Terence Rattigan centenary celebrations now moves to Chichester where the Festival Theatre is presenting an exciting and very wide-ranging season dedicated to the playwright and his work. First up is Philip Franks’s production of Rattigan’s classic The Deep Blue Sea, which is partially cross-cast with Nicholas Wright’s new play, Rattigan’s Nijinsky. Franks’s approach to The Deep Blue Sea is straightforward and traditional, and if the production doesn’t quite match Karel Reisz’s production [reviewed here and now available in the very desirable Rattigan boxset] for sustained intensity, it remains a fine account of the play that sensitively conveys its sadnesses, its humour and its hopes.

As Hester, the expert Amanda Root gives a marvellously unfussy and affecting performance that compellingly captures the difficulty of the character’s position. Here, Hester’s clear-eyed awareness of her predicament in no way mitigates her sexual and emotional dependency upon Freddie (the always-engaging John Hopkins). This dependency is conveyed powerfully in the scene in which Freddie announces that he’s leaving her, Root’s face contorting with shock and grief at the news. Still, it’s Root’s discreet delivery of the line “Just my love” that encapsulates the economy and intelligence of her performance best. Her scenes with Pip Donaghy’s wry, sympathetic Mr. Miller are especially strong, and their final encounter was the emotional highlight of the production for me. Anthony Calf finds more humour in the cuckolded Sir William than I’ve ever seen an actor do before and, like Penelope Wilton and Ian Holm in the Reisz production, he and Root  suggest the weight of a real history together. In support, Susan Tracy pitches her Mrs. Elton just right (“Sad, isn’t it, how one always seems to prefer nice people to good people, don’t you think?”) and Faye Castelow and Joseph Drake (whom it took a while to recognise from his star turn earlier this year in the Young Vic's Vernon God Little) are distinguished as the Welches. Drake is especially effective in the superb late scene in which Philip arrogantly reveals his interest in Hester’s dilemma as part of his “study of human nature.”

Indeed, Franks’s production revealed something about the design of the play that’s never occurred to me before: the extent to which the structure revolves around a woman receiving advice and judgements about her actions from others before finding (via the intervention of an apparently peripheral character) the courage and resolve to try to make her own way and “begin again.” It’s an arc that’s traced with particular clarity and insight in this accomplished and thoroughly involving production.

The production runs for 2 hours 35 minutes and is playing in rep with Rattigan’s Nijinsky until 3rd September. Further information here.

Review: 3 Terence Rattigan Adaptations (BFI)

To accompany their major season of Terence Rattigan-scripted films which is underway this month, BFI Southbank have added a selection of television adaptations of Rattigan’s work to the Mediatheque archive, giving viewers a rare (and free!) opportunity to see several key television productions. Over the past week I watched three of the adaptations - The Browning Version (1985) starring Ian Holm and Judi Dench; Cause Célébre (1987), with Helen Mirren and David Morrissey; and The Deep Blue Sea (1994) with Penelope Wilton and Colin Firth - and wanted to record a few thoughts on them here.

Cause Célébre (ITV 1987, dir. John Gorrie)

As an adaptation case study, the most interesting (though not the best) of the three productions is undoubtedly Cause Célébre, Rattigan’s 1977 play about the Alma Rattenbury murder trial which is currently being staged by Thea Sharrock at the Old Vic [review here]. What’s interesting about the TV adaptation is the fairly radical way in which director John Gorrie and screenwriter Ken Taylor have transformed the play. Gone is the clunky parallel plot involving the leader of the jury at the trial; instead the adaptation focuses on Alma’s developing relationship with her young lover George, her family life, the murder of her husband, and the ensuing court case. Though there are loses to this streamlining of the plot, there are also considerable gains in clarity and focus, and, for me, the adaptation made much more sense of the material than Sharrock’s Old Vic production (or indeed Rattigan’s play itself) really succeeded in doing.

The play’s structure at times felt forced, and awkward, as if Rattigan was straining to prove that he could construct a non-linear narrative. Elements that seemed frustratingly sketchy in the original are developed in the TV adaptation, and though the results are, formally, much more conventional, they’re also more emotionally insightful. Alma and George’s relationship is skilfully fleshed out, we get a much clearer sense of Alma’s conflicts as a mother, wife and lover, and Taylor has written some excellent new scenes for the minor characters. The actors benefit from this: Harry Andrews, as Alma’s ill-fated husband, registers strongly, while David Morrissey is also memorable as George, presenting the character as a film-fed fantasist capable of both tenderness and violence. And Mirren is superb, especially in the scene in which Alma finds her husband’s body. In contrast to the somewhat arch and artificial tone of Sharrock’s production, Gorrie’s adaptation grounds the play in naturalistic domestic detail, and the trial scenes (again, judiciously trimmed) are also well-handled, with excellent work from David Suchet as Alma’s shrewd lawyer and from Oliver Ford Davies as George’s defence counsel. (The production is worth seeing simply for Davies’s inimitable delivery of the line “a woman of abnormal sexual appetites.”) This Cause Célébre isn’t quite Rattigan’s Cause Célébre but it’s a worthy account of a flawed play, as well as a fascinating companion piece to the Old Vic production.

The Browning Version (BBC 1985, dir. Michael A Simpson)

                                                                                      
In contrast to Gorrie and Taylor’s fairly free adaptation of one of Rattigan’s lesser-known dramas, Simpson’s The Browning Version and Karel Reisz’s The Deep Blue Sea are thoroughly faithful, and stylistically conservative, renderings of Rattigan’s two best-regarded plays. But both are stunningly good. Eschewing any obvious “opening out” of the action, the two productions are “filmed theatre” in the best sense, placing the emphasis firmly upon dialogue and performance, while also benefiting from the increased intimacy of the close-up and the quick shifts in perspective that the camera provides. The Browning Version has superb performances from Ian Holm as the ageing, unloved Classics schoolmaster Crocker-Harris, and from Judi Dench as his  resentful wife, Millie, who’s involved in an affair with one of her husband’s colleagues (Michael Kitchen). The role of this humourless stickler of a tutor is a challenge for an actor, but Holm plays it to perfection, presenting Crocker-Harris as a man who’s closed himself off from others through a mixture of pride and self-contempt. Dench, meanwhile, brings gusto, and a touch of glamour, to Millie's cruelty, while also making clear the disappointments that have driven her there. (What is it about Dench’s performances? They always make the viewer feel more alert and alive, somehow.) And it’s very pleasing to see the young Steven Mackintosh in an early role as the student, Taplow, whose unanticipated gift briefly succeeds in piercing Crocker-Harris’s reserve, in a scene that is a powerfully affecting highlight of the production. It can be watched on YouTube.




The Deep Blue Sea (BBC 1994, dir. Karel Reisz)

As Sir William Collyer, the unlucky Holm gets to play the cuckold again in Reisz's 1994 BBC teleplay of The Deep Blue Sea, delivering another excellent performance, one that doesn’t ask for - or inspire - much sympathy. As in The Browning Version, every shift of feeling and allegiance registers in Reisz’s production (which originated at the Almeida in 1993 and then transferred to the Apollo) and the standard of performance is extremely high. Penelope Wilton’s award-winning Hester is stunning; Wilton brings understated intensity (and a great deal of wit) to the role and powerfully conveys Hester’s emotional and sexual dependency upon Freddie. Her scenes with Holm (to whom she was really married at the time) combine tension with striking moments of complicity and connection that suggest a real history together. Colin Firth gives what I think is one of his finest-ever performances as Freddie, and there's distinguished supporting work from Stephen Tompkinson and Geraldine Sommerville as the Welches, Carmel McSharry as Mrs. Elton and Wojciech Pszoniak as Miller. Reisz truncates the crucial climactic encounter between Hester and Miller and slightly reduces the impact of the scene. But the production is compelling throughout, and comes to a graceful and moving end.

The humanity of Rattigan’s writing and the propensity of his work to give sympathetic voice to characters who are harshly judged or dismissed by others emerges strongly in all of these fine adaptations, each of which is well worth seeing. What’s slightly tormenting about the productions is that they’re a reminder of just how great British TV drama was, and how closely connected to theatre, not so very long ago.