16-05-2025
PATRICK MARMION reviews The Deep Blue Sea at the Theatre Royal: Tale of romantic regret hidden by veil of primness
The Deep Blue Sea (Theatre Royal, Haymarket, London)
Was there ever a play that craved intimacy like Terence Rattigan's The Deep Blue Sea?
Starring Tamsin Greig, Rattigan's 1952 tale of Hester Collyer, a society lady who tries to kill herself after an adulterous affair, is a modern classic of romantic neuralgia.
But for its emotional agonies to really torture us, I was hoping for a more intimate atmosphere than is provided by Lindsay Posner's respectable production, first seen in Bath last year.
As ever, Greig is a powerful stage presence, catching Hester's shame and anguish at being abandoned by her pusillanimous playboy squeeze, Freddie (Hadley Fraser), a keen amateur golfer (the writing was on the wall). And yes, she mobilises an impressive sense of stultified post-war duty to keep calm and carry on.
But the scene where she polishes Freddie's shoes, before he leaves her forever, feels more like a compliant mother seeing her son off to school than desperate self-abasement.
Hiding behind a veil of primness and courtesy, we get only glimpses of the emotional lift shaft inside her – until we hear her terrified shrieks, like those of a wounded animal. Mostly, though, we see her character trying (and failing) to abide by the forbidding social conventions of her day. Those conventions are brought to bear with caring, patrician warmth by Nicholas Farrell (sporting a thick goatee) as her much older husband, who gets about in a chauffeur-driven Rolls.
Hester's emotional declamation is instead facilitated by Finbar Lynch, as the scruffy, evasive, former doctor upstairs who saves her life and offers sympathetic counsel.
The damp sock of a Ladbroke Grove flat where the play is set, with its peeling wallpaper, rusty fire place and prominent gas meter, could easily fetch £2million today. But our brave new world has little or no sense of the social costs that shape Hester's moral dilemmas. A more intimate staging might have helped us feel her pain more sharply. The Deep Blue Sea runs until June 21.
Theatre skewers itself – but thanks to impeccable timing, no actors were harmed in the making of this comic masterpiece
By Libby Purves
Noises Off (New Wolsey Theatre, Ipswich and touring)
Rating:
Michael Frayn's play about actors is always welcome: a comic masterpiece and loving study in theatre's own absurdity.
The first act shows a final limping rehearsal for a hackneyed trouser-dropping farce. The second offers a view from backstage, halfway through the tour, as we hear the play continuing while watching the cast's jealousies and inadequacies creating mimed fury, mutual sabotage, violence — and desperation to keep the whisky bottle and the oldest veteran apart. The third is back onstage for a last performance which dissolves into helpless confusion.
Its brilliance lies both in satirizing its own profession and in the remorseless rhythm of returning lines and rising hopelessness.
The challenge of turning round the set — twice — is especially fascinating in Douglas RIntoul's touring production: it's in partnership with Hornchurch, Theatre By The Lake and Théatres de la Ville de Luxembourg. The latter's designer Clio Van Aerde has created some clever movable sets: without a curtain the audience very much enjoyed watching high-efficiency stagehands hauling it all around.
Altogether it is considerable fun, handling all the physical jokes beautifully — George Kemp's tied-shoelace and downstairs tumble positively heroic — and Russell Richardson's drunken old ham Selsden is a joy.
But they're all absolutely on-point and fearless. And goodness, in this play they have to be.
The show runs in Ipswich to May 24, then moves to Queen's Theatre Hornchurch (May 28 - June 7); Les Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg (June 13 - 15) and Theatre by the Lake (June 25-July 26).
Forget 'fair Verona'. Welcome to the Wild West, where Romeo and Juliet are about to meet at a hoedown…
By Veronica Lee
Romeo And Juliet (Shakespeare's Globe, London)
Verdict: Giddy up
Your reaction to being told that director Sean Holmes has given a Wild West setting to Shakespeare's tragedy about star-cross'd lovers might be 'Why?' But hold your horses...
Holmes mines great comedy from the text, particularly in the first half, and not just because the sight of the warring Montagues and Capulets in cowboy boots and Stetsons, and the ladies in gingham — and line dancing — seems incongruous.
But here they are, on a set by Paul Wills that would grace any Western: a simple wooden barn-type affair with swinging saloon doors and a loft space where a hoedown band plays.
The frontier setting underlines how dangerous a place Verona could be, when choosing the wrong side in a family feud could mean a dagger in the heart — or here, a bullet in the chest.
This is a pleasingly original take on the text, the knockabout comedy of the first half contrasting, and giving real heft, to the final scenes where those previously killed (or assumed dead, in Juliet's case) — Paris, Tybalt and Mercutio — appear to have come back to life on stage as we see the young lovers kill themselves. The frailty of human life is made abundantly clear.
Rawaed Asde convinces as a hot-headed Romeo, one moment full of unrequited love for Rosaline, the next head over heels with her cousin Juliet, played here with verve by Lola Shalam.
Great support is given by Michael Elcock as a swaggering Mercutio, Calum Callaghan as a menacing Tybalt and Jamie-Rose Monk as a wily Nurse.
This is an unashamedly crowd-pleasing production — the large number of American students in on the night I saw it were completely wowed by it — but it's too long at three hours, and Holmes doesn't fully deliver on the bold concept.
Until August 2 (
Funny, saucy, and totally gripping, 1536 tells the tale of one doomed Queen, three Essex girls…and a lot of men behaving badly
By Georgia Brown
1536 (Almeida, North London)
Verdict: It's a man's world
In a week when the royal rift between the King and Prince Harry is being compared with another family at war — the Beckhams of Essex — a new play draws eloquent parallels between Henry VIII's murderous dispatch of Anne Boleyn and three ordinary Essex girls, who are also hapless victims of the patriarchy.
Ava Pickett's debut play may have nothing new to say, but the way she tells it — using funny, authentic, anachronistic, intimate girl-talk, fizzing with swear words — is as accomplished as it is original.
The play begins as news arrives from London that the Queen, now labelled the Great Whore, has been sent to the Tower.
In nearby Colchester, suspicious husbands are setting their wives alight.
These burning issues are picked over in a scorched field where Anna, the village beauty, has passionate sex with her posh lover; Mariella, the village midwife, washes bloodstained laundry and hangs it out to dry — and their more conventional friend, Jane, regularly wanders.
'Do you think she did it?' asks Jane. 'I wonder if he'll kill her?' muses Mariella.
The characters are vibrantly drawn. Siena Kelly's Anna is vain, certainly, but also a sensualist, revelling in the power her desirability gives her — free loaves from the baker and endless attention, scarily careless that her reputation makes her unmarriageable.
Mariella (Tanya Reynolds) is more worldly wise, her heart still bleeding for the love of her life, William, who married his social equal, who is now pregnant.
Liv Hill's naif Jane, whose dowry makes her a catch, is resigned to a life of making babies and dinner for a kind man.
Anna is then she discovers that her lover has proposed to her friend.
Much of the play is talk, until in a shocking, slightly rushed climax, when it catches dramatic fire.
But it never fails to grip. It has already won prizes, Lyndsey Turner's vibrant production and a trio of exceptional performances deserve more.
Until June 7.
