The Deep Blue Sea is one of the greatest plays ever written
about the inequality of love,
about how sexuality can hijack you
and turn everything upside down in an instant.
DAN REBELLATO: He places his characters in a very precise...
social setting — whether that's in terms of class
or whether that's in terms of attitudes to gender.
He's particularly clear in a play like The Deep Blue Sea,
which is about a very upper middle class woman
who has left a relationship with a High Court judge
and she's now living in a seedy part of west London
with a young alcoholic airman.
I think Freddie releases something in Hester which she's never experienced before.
It's about passion. It's about danger. It's about a sense of self.
PHILIP: She's saved from suicide, but it's not easy, by any means.
She's given back a tiny, tiny bit of self-respect
when the man upstairs values a piece of her artwork.
It's one of Rattigan's tiny things, but it's a tiny moment that could turn a corner.
He homes in, like a camera going as close as they possibly can into one detail.
If you did peel the wall off that boarding house,
you'd see five tragedies, but we happen to be looking at one.
Every aspect of that play is constructed
in order to make Hester Collyer somebody who simply cannot say what she thinks.
It's all part of the world that he creates around this story
that makes it more than just a story about a woman who loves a man too much.
You see Hester at the end starting to make one small step,
the first of what one hopes will be many — but it might not be —
to being a person in her own right,
not defined in the terms of her relationships.
It's a profoundly subconscious play, actually.
It's not just trotting through a series of themes.
It really wretchedly comes from the heart of Terence Rattigan
and that's what so amazing about it.
Separate Tables
It's about sex and loneliness.
And the inequality of love in all its most painful manifestations.
I think he writes about that better than anybody.
Typically Rattigan — he'll choose a setting for a play very, very carefully.
They're often places of transience
or desperation or sort of...in some way, a terminus.
We meet a disgraced former MP
who's been in prison for beating his wife.
And his wife, who is a society beauty and drug addict.
That play is, if you like, the tragedy of heterosexuality.
They are profoundly linked, but they tear each other to pieces.
The second play is its precise opposite.
It's about a very upright military major, Major Pollock,
who strikes up a delicate but easily crushable friendship
with the very, very dominated daughter of a monstrous army widow, Mrs Railton-Bell.
Their friendship is absolutely destroyed
by the revelation that the major has committed a sexual indiscretion.
We mustn't forget that theatre censorship laws were very, very strict,
in terms of both linguistic content and emotional and sexual content.
You absolutely couldn't do certain things that we now totally take for granted.
DAN: In the original version, he was arrested for groping women in a cinema.
The version that people now do is what he really meant —
that he was arrested for importuning young men.
There is a tension between what Rattigan was living and what he could express.
Given that homosexuality was criminalised,
he simply couldn't write absolutely frankly and directly about that —
although, of course, he does.
But he certainly benefits from a sort of pressure,
as I think a lot of writers do,
that if you feel that you're under a lot of strain,
maybe that compresses your art.
DAN: He plans out his plays very, very meticulously.
Some critics used to criticise him for this.
They thought there was something soulless and mechanical about how the plays worked.
Actually, I think, in the best plays,
what you realise is that he is working out a mechanism
that will reveal something very truthful about the characters.
FRANK: They are very polite characters in Rattigan's plays.
I don't think that makes them trivial or repressed
or hidden or buried or shallow or superficial.
It is simply the way they are.
I think politeness and manners are, indeed, often to do with empathy and insight
and he deals with that beautifully
without shirking the pain and desolation for a second.
He is like a writer working behind the Iron Curtain
who has to smuggle the play that he wants to write past the authorities
and past the barons of the commercial theatre.
They're not such establishment plays, as they're sometimes characterised as being.
They're actually, in some ways, quite subversive.
He's ahead of his time, in that sense.