The Deep Blue Sea
Vaudeville
The Birthday Party
Lyric Hammersmith
Pygmalion
Old Vic
Osborne crushed Rattigan. Crudely stated, that’s what we’re told happened in 1956 when Osborne’s demotic new voice displaced Rattigan’s classier, cosier manner. Even now Rattigan’s reputation hasn’t fully recovered and The Deep Blue Sea, which premièred in 1952, is the first of his plays I’ve seen in the West End. And guess what? It feels exactly like Look Back in Anger. The setting is identical — a shabby flat. The storyline uses the same torrid love triangle. Two similar outlooks are examined: reckless youth is contrasted with safe, dull conservatism. And both plays have a familiarly rancid atmosphere. Post-war England, burdened with snobbery and sexual prudishness, is a squalid community where emotional torpor and an oppressive pettiness seep into every pore. But Rattigan’s play is richer and easier to watch than anything Osborne wrote in the 1950s. As a dramatist he’s more relaxed, his talent is more evenly spread, and there’s far more of it. He can write all kinds of characters sympathetically whereas Osborne is only at home with males, and particularly with male pontificators, who roam the stage spouting a peculiar strain of toxic lamentation.
The play opens with a suicide gone wrong. Hester Collyer is separated from her lawyer husband Sir William and has shacked up with Freddie, a dashing alcoholic test-pilot. Lonely old Sir William pines for Hester but she still loves Freddie, who no longer loves her. Explaining that lot takes a good half an hour but once the machinery is in place the story trundles forward with a horrible and gripping momentum. Simon Williams is a natural comedian but he stoutly suppresses the urge to send up the good-natured, pompous Sir William.
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