I have long credited Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea for being the play that changed my life – I previously wrote here about the schools trip I was taken on to see a production of it when I was 14, and which duly awakened a personal passion for the theatre that of course has also become my professional journey, too. Every time I see it now, of course, I marvel not just at the depth of feeling in the play in its story of unequal love and the distress, demands and sacrifice experienced by the parties to it, but just how the young me even had the slightest access to the dark charges of pain it releases. It’s great writing, of course; but somewhere within it is something universal, too: even though I could not possibly have yet experienced anything like it shows at 14, somehow I could see the future in it, too that now, 30 years later, I truly comprehend.
I try to never miss the chance to see a production now.
Over the years I have seen, amongst others, Dorothy Tutin (at Greenwich), Susan Wooldridge (Manchester’s Royal Exchange), Penelope Keith (Haymarket), Penelope Wilton (Almeida), Blythe Danner (New York’s Roundabout Theatre Company) and most recently, Harriet Walter, on tour at Richmond in 2003, in a production directed by Thea Sharrock. I was back in Richmond yesterday afternoon to see a new touring version, this time with Greta Scacchi, and even if she doesn’t quite mine the emotional depths of Hester Collyer’s suffering (though she captures a lot of her dignity), I was still moved to tears in the last aching scene of her and her lover Freddie Page’s final parting. Intriguingly, Lyn Gardner in her Guardian review yesterday saw “no sign of the attraction between Hester and Freddie that originally sparked this destructive passion”, but then stumbles into a conclusion that suggests she was actually watching A Doll’s House: “In the end I was not interested enough in Nora to care if she lived or died.”
Going back to see The Deep Blue Sea I nearly experienced a loss of my own, and of something that has been with me as long as this play has: an old knitted scarf I’ve had from the time I was that schoolboy. I got off the train at Richmond, and as the train was pulling out, realised I had left that scarf on board. I went to the platform guard – yes, there was one at Richmond – and he immediately telephoned ahead to the next stop at Twickenham, and told the guard there where to look for it when the train arrived. Five minutes later, he got a call back: it had been found, and put on the next train coming back to Richmond. About ten minutes later, my scarf and I were reunited! So at least this story had a happy ending, even if the one I was about to see didn’t! (And isn’t it good to be able to tell a positive story about travelling on the railways? Thank you, Faz, the station guard concerned).
But going to the Barbican, on the other hand, seldom has a happy beginning, let alone a happy ending (though the bits in between, onstage, are at least sometimes worth the suffering). Going there last night to catch the transfer of The Harder they Come from Stratford East, I discovered that once again corporate event priorities take precedence over paying arts customers, with great trenches of both the main downstairs and riverside foyers roped off and deserted. This had the unfortunate side effect, too, of rendering the usual box office point for same night ticket collection out of bounds; so audiences who have finally learnt where to find it had to trek back up to the draughty Silk Street advance box office entrance to pick up their tickets instead. Clearly, even after all the vast sums of money spent on refurbishing these public areas (and just how did the scuffed stalls parquet flooring remain untouched in that refurbishment?), finding where you are supposed to go is still a moving target, as new interventions in how the place is run are made up as they go along.
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