On 8 Might 1956, Terence Rattigan stood outdoors the Royal Courtroom theatre in London after the opening evening of a revolutionary new drama. This was not certainly one of his personal performs however a sally from the upstart technology: John Osborne’s Look Again in Anger. Or, because the veteran playwright bitterly renamed it: Look How In contrast to Terence Rattigan I’m Being. Refinement was out, the Offended Younger Man was in, and the creator of Separate Tables and The Winslow Boy had plummeted from favour.
However that each one modified in 1993 – with Karel Reisz’s revival of The Deep Blue Sea, Rattigan’s most penetrating work. Penelope Wilton performed Hester Collyer, who’s separated from her husband, a primly patriarchal excessive court docket choose. She now lives in sin along with her youthful lover, the carousing ex-RAF pilot Freddie Web page. The play begins with Hester’s listless physique being found by her neighbours. She has tried to fuel herself after Freddie did not return for her birthday. (She would have succeeded had there been sufficient cash within the meter.) The remainder of the day, and the play, is spent raking over the detritus of her life. Freddie bowls in obliviously; her husband tries to coax her again to the marital house; and the enigmatic former physician, Miller, exhorts her to “go on residing”.
Tamsin Greig, who at 57 is about to play Hester in a brand new manufacturing, noticed Reisz’s model when she was beginning out as an actor. “I used to be blown away,” says Greig, consuming a salad roll in a church corridor throughout a break from rehearsals. Seated beside her is Oliver Chris, her 45-year-old co-star from the surreal hospital sitcom Inexperienced Wing, who’s taking part in Freddie. “It was so charming,” Greig marvels. “Penelope gave such a deep efficiency.”
Earlier generations had puzzled over Hester, who combines formidable intelligence with delusional craving, relating to others with readability from inside her personal fog of disgrace. (Every evening earlier than stepping on stage throughout a 2016 revival, the late Helen McCrory listened to Amy Winehouse’s You Know I’m No Good.) The character was impressed by Rattigan’s ex-lover, the actor Kenneth Morgan, who had left the playwright for an additional man, solely to then fuel himself when that new relationship hit the rocks. Rattigan, distraught to be taught of Morgan’s demise, was already changing it into drama that very same night. He was heard saying to himself: “The play will open with the physique found useless in entrance of the fuel fireplace.”
The Deep Blue Sea premiered three years later, in March 1952. The unique Hester, Peggy Ashcroft, fretted that she couldn’t presumably make her character sympathetic. The Observer critic Ivor Brown wrote that Hester “wants a superb slap or a straight speak with a Marriage Steering Skilled”. Instances change. Modern critics admired the traces of Racine, and of Greek tragedy, in Wilton’s efficiency. The Guardian’s Michael Billington mentioned Ashcroft confirmed Hester to be “painfully conscious of the humiliating value of her fixation” with Freddie, and known as the position “certainly one of Twentieth-century theatre’s greatest components for a girl”.
Greig, who has brief, uneven silver hair and is sporting a powder-blue jumper, weighs the challenges of an method within the twenty first century. “Peggy Ashcroft mentioned she felt as if she had no garments on when she was taking part in the half. I feel we’re in a barely totally different place now. If we don’t have our garments off, actually or psychologically, then individuals really feel a bit cheated. It’s about tips on how to be uncovered whereas nonetheless hiding one thing.”
She and Chris, who’s busy attempting to not spill his rooster wrap down his navy-blue sweater, are greatest recognized for comedy. Greig has starred in a few of the funniest sitcoms of the final 25 years – not solely Inexperienced Wing however Black Books, Episodes and Friday Evening Dinner – whereas Chris’s credit embrace the West Finish and Broadway runs of One Man, Two Guvnors. They final appeared collectively on stage in a 2017 gender-fluid Twelfth Evening: Greig was Malvolia in a witchy black wig, Chris a boisterous, boxing Orsino.
Though you wouldn’t essentially comprehend it from Terence Davies’s austere 2011 movie of The Deep Blue Sea, which starred Rachel Weisz and Tom Hiddleston, there are mordant laughs in Rattigan’s textual content, which crackles with gallows, or gas-leak, humour. “It is humorous,” Greig agrees. “The humour is a coping mechanism. It makes you ask: what’s beneath the tip of that iceberg?”
She mentions an amusing trade within the play about Lyme Regis, which causes Chris to let loose a sulky harrumph. “I don’t assume I’m going to get any laughs on this,” he says. “And if anybody else does, I’m taking them down.”
“If anybody appears to be like like they’re getting fun, I’ll inform them, ‘Cease!’” Greig assures him.
“That’s it,” says Chris. “‘Cease! You don’t know what he’s like!’”
Greig warms to the thought: “He’s tall however he’s fragile.” Then she thinks for a second. “Fragile as a result of tall?”
“You’ve hit the nail on the pinnacle,” says Chris.
Their banter is close to fixed: he teases Greig for nibbling her lunch “like an Edwardian countess”, whereas she attracts consideration to his Trevor Howard-style interval haircut. Once they met 20 years in the past on Inexperienced Wing, issues had been very totally different. Though Chris had appeared in The Workplace, he felt “very intimidated by all these comedy individuals”. He turns to Greig: “Throughout our improvisations, you wiped the ground with me! I used to be throwing you duff ball after duff ball.”
“The bizarre factor for me now,” she says, “is having to be passionate – when Ollie and I’ve mucked about in our different jobs. I’ve bought to the age the place you assume, ‘Oh, that kind of performing gained’t be required any extra. I’ll simply have to be scary or controlling.’ However taking part in Hester is about being weak, in addition to being an object of want. It’s about displaying underbelly.”
All this tomfoolery leaves one fairly unprepared for his or her rigorous method to Rattigan’s textual content. Requested to elucidate its enduring energy, their focus sharpens immediately. “These are fashionable concepts he’s addressing,” says Greig. “This factor of being sort to your self, ‘residing your greatest life’ as we are saying now. Hester asks whether or not criminals can escape their sentence and Miller says, ‘Sure, if the choose is honest – and never blind with hatred for the felony – as you’re for your self.’ That’s a really fashionable tackle self-care.”
“Do you assume Hester is each the protagonist and the antagonist?” asks Chris.
“Haha! Sure!” Greig exclaims. “It’s like that psychotherapeutic view of goals, which says each character is you.”
“She’s bought to win the battle,” Chris says. “Possibly that’s why Peggy Ashcroft had these points about being unsympathetic. What she may need found is that Hester is in a battle with herself.”
Greig asks Chris the place that leaves his character, Freddie. “It’s sophisticated,” he says, forehead creasing. “You’re offered, on the floor, with somebody who’s irresponsible and infantile, out of their depth, unable to perform in society and on this relationship. However at the same time as Freddie will get progressively drunker, there are factors the place he makes fairly a superb argument. He’s trapped, too. He’s struggling.”
Freddie’s response to by chance discovering his lover’s suicide word is to storm out and get sloshed. “Suicide is a part of the play,” Chris concedes. “However take into consideration the influence that has in the actual world. This man has come house and found that the girl he loves has tried to kill herself, arguably as a result of he forgot her birthday. That’s going to ship even an inexpensive particular person spiralling.
“Look, I don’t have an enormous reference to suicide, however once I was a child, my greatest pal from toddler and junior college – we’d since grown aside – killed himself at 16. The factor I keep in mind from the funeral is his dad and mom’ anger. His dad gave the eulogy and he was furious. So there may be that influence. The concept Freddie has been on the top of a near-miss and goes to kick up all of the silt and ashes and embers of all the pieces. Then he grabs on to no matter there may be – and it’s a bottle.”
At one stage, Freddie slams a shilling down on the desk in order that Hester’s subsequent suicide try gained’t fail. Greig argues that even this apparently callous act is extra complicated than it appears. “I feel it’s about selection,” she says. “He leaves the coin. Miller provides her the sleeping tablets. There’s a bottle of whisky, a bottle of claret. They’re difficult each other. ‘These are the issues you will have been utilizing – and I problem you to see that.’ Miller says it on the finish: it’s Hester who has the facility to decide on.”
Chris appears grateful for Greig’s advocacy on behalf of his character. “I do really feel defensive of poor previous Freddie,” he says. “He actually spells all of it out: if an individual loves you in a sure method, and you’ll’t return the love, what are you meant to do?”
“That’s the human situation,” says Greig. “All of us love in another way. The query is, ‘How will we reside with that?’”
The Deep Blue Sea is on the Ustinov Studio, Theatre Royal, Tub, till 1 June.
