The Return of Terence Rattigan

Last year the centenary of the birth of the English playwright and screenwriter Terence Rattigan was celebrated in Britain by revivals of two of his best plays, Cause Célèbre and Flare Path, and a new film version of The Deep Blue Sea. The critical disdain for the playwright’s commercialism and insistence on writing so-called well-made plays, which followed the premiere of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger in 1956, seems forgotten. As for the British public, the performances of Flare Path and Cause Célèbre I attended early last year were crowded with enthusiastic theatregoers. In Australia, however, the revival of Rattigan’s reputation has gone almost unnoticed. Terence Davies’s new film version of The Deep Blue Sea opened in the art houses to some excellent reviews, but at the time of writing only the Chauvel and the Cremorne Orpheum were screening it in Sydney.

This is very different from the 1940s and 1950s, when Rattigan wrote screenplays for some of the best British films of the era—The Way to the Stars, The Browning Version, The Sound Barrier, The Winslow Boy and Separate Tables—all of which had long runs in movie houses such as the Embassy in Sydney.

His plays were equally welcome on the stage in Australia. In 1955 three Rattigan plays were playing in Sydney; Separate Tables and The Sleeping Prince at the Elizabethan Theatre in Newtown, and The Deep Blue Sea at the Theatre Royal. Essentially these were touring West End productions. Most of the leads were distinguished British actors. Googie Withers, who starred as Hester in The Deep Blue Sea, had even played the part in the original production when she replaced Celia Johnson. (Although very powerful, Withers’s performance reportedly broke no new ground. Critics insisted it was based on the interpretations by Johnson and Peggy Ashcroft, who created the part in 1952.) These links with British theatre are regrettably now seen as part of the cultural cringe. Terence Rattigan has come to be recognised as one of the great dramatists of the last century and these productions of some of his finest works meant Australian audiences were experiencing international theatre.

Given the vagaries of distribution in this country, where prints of a mindless actioner like The Avengers are dominating screens in multiplexes all over the country, it is likely many readers won’t be able to see Terence Davies’s film adaptation of The Deep Blue Sea in a cinema for many years. However, the DVD will soon be on sale—mine arrived from the UK the same day the film opened at the Roseville cinema in April. In addition, the BBC’s DVD Terence Rattigan Collection includes Karel Reisz’s 1994 television adaptation of his own production of the play which, according to Dan Rebellato’s introduction to the Nick Hern Books edition of The Deep Blue Sea, inspired a string of successful revivals, and placed the play firmly in the canon of twentieth-century drama—yet another example of DVDs becoming an alternative form of distribution.

For most of us, Reisz’s television version is the only way to see how The Deep Blue Sea works theatrically. The action begins in the corridor of a rooming house in north-west London, as the landlady and two of the other tenants smell gas and rush into the sitting room of a furnished flat. There they find Hester Collyer lying in front of an unlit gas fire. The play then follows Hester through the rest of the day. In a series of beautifully structured exposition scenes, we learn that she is the wife of a judge, Sir William Collyer, and that Hester has left him to live with Freddie Page, an alcoholic former RAF fighter pilot.

Although performances are beautifully pitched to the camera, all the original’s theatrical moments are preserved—the lead-up to a second suicide attempt, two brilliant telephone scenes, and Hester’s frightening emotional breakdown at the end of Act II. Such is the playwright’s mastery of his craft that we barely notice the way everything is made to happen in the one locale. Indeed, confining the action to the dingy sitting room of Page’s flat places the characters under a magnifying glass and enables the spectator to appreciate a rich subtext.

The Deep Blue Sea is one of Rattigan’s most personal works. The idea for the play came from the suicide in 1949 of his lover, the actor Kenneth Morgan. In spite of their on-and-off-again relationship dating back to 1939, Morgan had left Rattigan to live with another actor. Later, distressed by his new lover’s inconstancy, Morgan gassed himself. Beneath the middle-class speech that Rattigan knew so well—he had arguably the best ear of any dramatic writer of the period—is a portrayal of different kinds of love. It is all the more powerful because the author had experienced much of the play’s anguish in various forms himself. This emphatically does not mean that Hester is Rattigan in drag—a gay relationship in disguise. As Penelope Wilton’s splendid Hester demonstrates, the character is a portrait of a full-blooded passionate woman.

If anyone represents Rattigan in the play it is probably Sir William—a hurt figure who genuinely cares for his wife, but not in the way she needs. Ian Holm gets the man’s pain and kindness just about right while never allowing us to forget, as Rattigan states in a stage direction, that he is a forceful-looking figure. Colin Firth’s Freddie relies a little too much on the RAF trappings: the airforce moustache, a flying jacket used as an overcoat. But Firth still gives a harsh, truthful portrayal of a man for whom, in the words of the play, the clock stopped in 1940.

Possibly the most original performance is Wojciech Pszoniak’s Polish take on Miller, the former doctor who attends to Hester in the opening then talks her out of a second suicide attempt in Act III. The Polish accent gives incisiveness to the tautly written dialogue. Miller has gone to prison and been struck off for some unnamed offence, code in the repressed world of 1950s Britain for homosexuality. Here the play really does have a gay subtext. However, the idea of making Miller continental could have come from the original production, where he was played by the Austrian actor Peter Illing. In any case, by making the character an outsider Rattigan lays the foundation for the bond between Miller and Hester that is ultimately to save her.

It is fortunate that Karel Reisz was able to adapt his groundbreaking stage production to television. He was, of course, a distinguished film director—Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Isadora—but here he uses the cameras to give the performances greater intimacy while at the same time preserving their honest theatricality; an invaluable illumination of the actors’ art and Rattigan’s achievement. 

Terence Davies’s script for his film version of The Deep Blue Sea avoids the original’s carefully wrought three-act structure where the situation is set up in the first act, then developed in the other two. As the director says in an interview, included in the special features on the DVD, he hates having all his exposition at the beginning. In the film Hester stands at the window—a hauntingly beautiful shot taken in natural light—draws the curtains and lies down in front of the gas fire. She then recalls in a series of flashbacks what brought her there. As the narrative unfolds, incidents described in the play’s dialogue are portrayed as Hester’s memories. Gone is the playwright’s subtle comparison between the relationship of Hester and Freddie with that of Ann and Philip, the married couple living upstairs, who come to Hester’s aid when she tries to kill herself. Miller’s intervention when he talks her out of a final suicide is also omitted. This second attempt is portrayed by a deft allusion to a sequence from David Lean’s Brief Encounter. In this romantic classic of British 1940s cinema, Celia Johnson’s character, distraught after parting with the man she loves, rushes to the edge of the platform as an express train passes, the lights from the carriages flashing onto her face. Similarly, after Freddie refuses to come home with her, Davies’s Hester rushes into a tube station but stops short as the train hurtles past. The knowing viewer would be aware that Celia Johnson’s housewife and Trevor Howard’s idealistic doctor do exactly the opposite to Hester and Freddie—afraid of hurting their families, they break off their relationship.

Davies keeps the essence of the exchanges in the play between Hester and Collyer, and even intensifies her bitter clash with Freddie by staging it outside a pub. The director believes truth in film-making lies within the frame, and he covers these scenes in beautifully composed one and two shots without the currently fashionable fast cutting or frenetic camera movement. It would have been very easy to have introduced sexually explicit scenes to depict Freddie giving himself in different ways to Hester, but Davies rightly stays with the original’s emphasis on the emotional tragedy. There is one lyrical nude love scene that portrays Hester and Freddie’s physical passion but that is all.

Davies has also written some new characters to portray the repressiveness against which Hester is rebelling. There is a scene in a church where her parson father (Oliver Ford Davies) urges Hester to return to her husband. Collyer’s mother, played brilliantly by the great stage actress Barbara Jefford, appears in two scenes where she warns against the danger of passion—“I much prefer guarded enthusiasm”—while directing a series of genteel barbs against her daughter-in-law. The dialogue here is so good that it might have been written by Rattigan himself.

Rattigan’s themes of sexual desire and emotional and social repression are enhanced by the way Davies has recreated the look of 1950s Britain. Except for Hester’s burgundy coat there are no bright colours and it is clear the country is still recovering from the war. We even get to see the bomb damage Rattigan mentions in the stage directions when he describes Hester and Freddie’s squalid flat. Rachel Weisz captures all of Hester’s passion and anguish. She has the same kind of screen presence Celia Johnson and Vivien Leigh brought to parts such as these in the 1940s and 1950s. Tom Hiddleston as Freddie manages to be both a believable romantic lover and an icily shallow and selfish partner, while Simon Russell Beale as Collyer conveys all the character’s pain and compassion.

Terence Davies’s The Deep Blue Sea is more than a skilful adaptation of a classic play; it is an extraordinarily accomplished film. It reminded me of the poetic realism of French cinema in the 1930s. To be sure, Davies and Rattigan are not romantic pessimists in the mould of director Marcel Carné and his favourite writer, Jacques Prévert. Nor would these very British artists have shared the poetic realists’ Popular Front ideology, which at times verged on a rather naive communism. Rattigan portrayed the establishment from within; he didn’t confront the values of his class, he subverted them. Rather it is Davies’s style that is similar. Carné’s lost working-class characters—played by Jean Gabin, Louis Jouvet, Arletty or Michèle Morgan in that beret and raincoat, did not go on location in working-class neighbourhoods; at least not for Carné. They wandered around some of the best sets in film history. Designer Alexandre Trauner’s rooms, stairwells, the whole exterior of the Hotel du Nord epitomised the reality they were portraying. They also allowed for sumptuous visuals. This was also the tradition of quality where fine writing was expected and, what’s more, treated with respect. However, Rattigan and Davies are every bit as good as the legendary writers from this great period of French cinema. Just listen to the film’s beautifully spoken dialogue. Designer James Merifield may not be Alexandre Trauner—Who is?—but he has created a cinematic space that allows for some rich visuals that once again epitomise the world of 1950s Britain that Davies was recreating.

For me the fact that one can validly make these sorts of comparisons between The Deep Blue Sea and works such as Port of Shadows, Le Jour se Lève or Hotel du Nord that are among the great films of the last century, indicates the extent of Terence Davies’s achievement, and the significance of this return of Terence Rattigan.