The Open Space of the Deep Blue Sea
Posted on 29th November 2024
More than any other local theatre group, Open Space focuses on classic texts, favouring writers such as Anton Chekov, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. In doing so they set themselves the considerable challenge of doing the texts justice, while breathing new life into frequently familiar narratives. The works of Terence Rattigan present the additional challenge of being neither contemporary nor period drama, but having previously tackled two of his best known plays it’s perhaps unsurprising that they were unable to resist returning to his work.
The central theme of The Deep Blue Sea is how attraction for some things, and some people, can be both seductive and destructive. Expecting this compulsion to be rationalised within the drama misses the point. Rattigan side stepped the question by offering a snapshot of a soured relationship that, while it might tempt the audience to speculate how things got this way, is really about dealing with a situation as you find it. Mia Chadwick was given the unenviable task of making us believe that Hester Collyer would be so infatuated with the ostensibly unlikeable Freddy Page that she would contemplate suicide in the face of a crumbling relationship. It’s a testament to her acting skills that the inherent improbability of Hester’s actions rarely crosses the audience’s mind, evoking our sympathy rather than disbelief, not withstanding her frustrating blind love. Equal yet opposite acting skills were required of Tim Hall, playing a cuckolded husband of saintly understanding. Hall’s earlier performance in Rattigan’s Browning Version remains one of the finest portraits of repressed vulnerability I can recall seeing, and he brought the same sense of quiet desperation to Sir William Collyer, utterly convincing as a man incapable of understanding, and therefore being angry with, his wife, yet incapable of offering a meaningful resolution. Within the supported cast, a special mention of Yves Green’s Mrs Elton is due, a role that showcasing her chameleon like ability to inhabit a woman of deference, so very different from the terrifying matriarchs she’s previously tackled. But perhaps most surprised was Ben Willmott’s playing of Freddy Page. Willmott is skilled as a comic performer, and must be used to eliciting laughs from his audience. He brought some of that charm to Page, going some way to rationalising Hester’s infatuation, but for the most part he must have relished getting his teeth into a truly unpleasant man-child who squandered time on golf and money on booze.
It’s fitting that, in a play where Freddie isn’t as awful as he seems, Hester isn’t unambiguously sympathetic, and Rob Backhouse’s Miller remains an enigma to the very end, director David Green required so many of his cast to take on roles antithetical to their respective comfort zones. In short, no one – neither cast nor character- turn out quite how you expect. To my mind it serves to emphasise that the company is not only committed to the presentation of ambitious work, but also to the continual development and growth of its roster of performers.