The Deep Blue Sea – Theatre Royal Haymarket

Last Updated on May 15, 2025

Tamsin Greig stars in a surprisingly funny and searingly tragic staging of Terence Rattigan’s play about love and suicide.

When Terence Rattigan was told that his ex-lover had disconnected the rubber hose from the stove and gassed himself, the playwright, in his grief, forged the opening scene of his next work.

And so The Deep Blue Sea begins with Hester Collyer, played by Tamsin Greig in this latest production at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, lying under a woollen blanket, seemingly dead. But she is luckier than the real man on whom she is partly based; she forgot to put a shilling in the meter, and the gas ran out before it could do its job. Hester is dragged to her feet to confront the gossiping neighbours and her inadequate lovers, the threat of suicide hanging over the rest of the play like a dark cloud ready to burst.

This production is set, like the original, in early 1950s London; women’s liberation and nostalgic World War Two veterans are the shiny new additions to a society still plagued by ration books and chauvinism. Hester finds herself trapped between two men – Sir William Collyer (played by Nicholas Farrell), her legal husband and a successful judge offering her fatherly love in a traditional marriage, and Freddie Page (played by Hadley Fraser), a younger heartthrob incapable of emotional depth. Empowered to leave her conservative husband for a more modern man, the move down a generation offers only a different type of insufficiency.

Lindsay Posner’s direction creates a surprisingly funny version of The Deep Blue Sea, humour drawn out of some of the play’s darkest moments. The first half is brilliantly performed by a talented ensemble cast, the door to the one room in which the entire play takes place constantly revolving as neighbours and visitors enter and exit, the complexities of their relationships gradually bubbling towards the surface. 

In fact, so funny is the first half that some moments of profundity in the second are slightly undermined; a climactic speech by the enigmatic neighbour-cum-doctor Mr Miller (played hilariously by Finbar Lynch) feels oddly out of place by the time it arrives, and Freddie’s outbursts verge on the cartoonish. But the most intense scenes in the play, which come when Hester’s deep despair boils over, desperately shouting down the staircase or into an urgently-dialled telephone, hit hard, with Tamsin Greig utterly convincing in the main role.

The impact of this version of The Deep Blue Sea is limited only by some of its themes being firmly rooted in the period, which is left untransposed. One can see why Rattigan’s understated style fell out of fashion in favour of John Osborne’s and Kingsley Amis’s “angry young men” group of playwrights, who perhaps more accurately portrayed a disillusioned and impoverished Britain that is present only in subtle jokes and references in The Deep Blue Sea. But as a personal examination of love, womanhood and the treacherous search for a happy life, Rattigan’s writing still stands up, providing both laughs and catharsis.

And the opening scene, an all-but-dead body lying curled up next to the stove, still plunges the audience into the action with all the shock of the original.

7 May 2025 – 21 June 2025

The Deep Blue Sea
Theatre Royal Haymarket
18 Suffolk Street
London
SW1Y 4HT