One-Sided Passion in Multidimensional Play: The Deep Blue Sea

The Deep Blue Sea by Terence Rattigan

Nick Hern Books

Pp. 90 

F3; M8

 

The play begins as a young woman, Hester Collyer, has attempted to take her own life, although the gas went out because there wasn’t enough money in the meter. In this respect, it almost commences with an element of black comedy. Hester is discovered by the landlady, Mrs Elton, and the couple from upstairs, Anne and Philip Welch. Mr Miller also gets involved, a mysterious resident of the tenement who may or may not be a doctor. It transpires that Hester is in love with Freddie Page and has left her barrister husband, Sir William Collyer, to be with him, but Freddie doesn’t feel quite the same as she does and is, in fact, alarmed by her physical passion. “He walks forward and kisses her. Instantly she responds, with an intensity of emotion that is almost ugly. After a moment he pushes her away and smacks her playfully.”

 

Freddie was an RAF fighter pilot until an accident curtailed his career, and he has turned to drink, although he still maintains the lingo and bravado. “Funny things about gongs, when you think what a lottery they were. They don’t mean a damn thing in war – except as a line-shoot, but in peacetime they’re quite useful.” When Jackie reminds Freddie that he was “the tops… as a test pilot”, he replies, “I was – a year ago. Since then things have changed a bit. (He points to his glass.) This stuff isn’t exactly what the doctor ordered for nerve and judgment. Besides I’m too ruddy old. You’re finished in that racket at twenty-five. I wouldn’t last a week. I want something chairborne – not airborne. I’ve had flying for life.” His staccato speech is in sharp contrast to Hester’s stillness, and when he first enters, her simple responses which are made without her once turning to meet Freddie’s eye, creates a cruelly ironic effect distancing Freddie from the audience’s sympathy.

 

The play takes place in one room, over the course of one day, follows one narrative, and as noted by Dan Rebellato in the introduction, “almost no violent action occurs on stage. This unshowy preservation of the Aristotelian unities perhaps subtly encourages an audience to expect a tragic ending.” Instead, there is a final glimmer of hope, and many contemporary critics felt cheated. Miller thinks Hester may some talent in her painting which might become a little flame. “Not a great fire, which could have illumined the world – oh no – I’m not saying that. But the world is a dark enough place for even a little flicker to be welcome.” Rebellato champions the play: “The story of Hester Collyer, trapped in a relationship with a man incapable of returning her love, and her transition from attempted suicide to groping, uncertain self-determination is handled with extraordinary economy, precision and power. The depths of despair and desire that Rattigan plumbs have made The Deep Blue Sea one of his most popular and moving pieces.” Other reviewers feel it is a brutally bleak meditation on the cruel consequences of one skirmish between sexual desire and social repression.

 

Rattigan was known for putting character ahead of ideas, and for themes of sexual longing and humiliation. Hester knows that Freddie loves her as much as he ever did, which means that he doesn’t. He’s not a bad man, but she is passionate about him and that is not socially acceptable for women in this era. In this respect, the play in similar to Look Back in Anger to which it is often compared, usually unfavourably. When asked what he thought about Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, Rattigan replied that it should have been retitled, ‘Look how unlike Terence Rattigan I’m being.’ Hester is a tough character to play without being mawkish, maudlin or melodramatic. She could also be self-pitying and dull or hard and matter of fact. It’s a fine balance. Hester explains, “When you’re between any kind of devil and the deep blue sea, the deep blue sea sometimes looks very inviting.”

 

Freddie tells his mate, Jackie Jackson, “A clergyman’s daughter, living in Oxford, marries the first man who asks her and falls in love with the first man who gives her an eye. (After a slight pause.) Hell, it’s not that I’m not in love with her too, of course I am. Always have been and always will. But – well – moderation in all things – that’s always been my motto. (At the table.) Have another?” Another touch of black humour in that he is immoderate in drink, while glibly discussing his lover’s broken heart. Freddie thinks only of himself, while accusing others of being selfish. “Supposing she’d pulled it off last night, do you realise what everyone would have said? That I’d bust up a happy marriage, and then driven Hes to suicide. I’d have been looked on as a ruddy murderer. Did she think of that, I wonder? Who the hell would have believed what I’ve just told you?” He is the conventional one, while Hester risks being a social outcast through her honesty. When having a disagreement with her husband, she says, “There are polite words and impolite words. They all add up to the same emotion.”

 

Collyer tells Hester that he would happily take her back and that he is even more in love with her than he was “on our wedding day.” He tells her that Freddie is reprehensible, with which the audience agrees. “This man you say you love is morally and intellectually a mile your inferior and has absolutely nothing in common with you whatever; what you’re suffering from is no more than an ordinary and rather common infatuation; and it’s your plain and simple duty to exert every effort of will you’re capable of in order to return to sanity at once.” She despairs that her husband cannot understand how she feels. “In sober truth neither you nor I nor anyone else can explain what I feel for Freddie. It’s all far too big and confusing to be tied up in such a neat little parcel and labelled lust. Lust isn’t the whole of life – and Freddie is, you see, to me. The whole of life – and of death, too, it seems. Put a label on that, if you can.” She will not return to Collyer, as she tells him, “I’m simply a prized possession that has now become more prized for having been stolen.”

 

Michael Billington wrote of The Deep Blue Sea, that it is “as timelessly true as Phèdre in its portrait of the inequality of passion.” Dan Rebellato considers that “Rattigan has placed Hester between her father the clergyman, her husband the judge, and her lover, the ex-airman; Hester’s sexuality is policed by a repressive triad of church, law and the army.” Philip attempts to take charge of the situation by telling Hester, “Without trying to be preachy or anything, it is really the spiritual values that count in this life, isn’t it? I mean the physical side is really awfully unimportant – objectively thinking, don’t you think?” A lot of the humour is at Philip’s expense, and he is so uptight and pompous that he doesn’t notice. When he lectures Hester by recounting his own experience – “I went away for a fortnight all by myself – and of course I had hell, but gradually things sort of got clearer in my mind, and when I got back I was out of the wood.” – she replies, “I’m so glad. Where was it you went?” His answer, Lyme Regis, deflates him and his specious argument.

 

Meanwhile, Miller appears to be the only one who can relate, as he counsels Hester, “To see yourself as the world sees you may be very brave, but it can also be very foolish. Why should you accept the world’s view of you as a weak-willed neurotic – better dead than alive? What right have they to judge? To judge you they must have the capacity to feel as you feel. And who has? One in a thousand. You alone know how you have felt. And you alone know how unequal the battle has always been that your will has had to fight.” This is also a caution to the audience. Miller is amused that Ann should concern herself about Hester’s mental state, when she is physically unharmed. “You make that distinction? Her mind is perfectly sound. There is no trace whatever of any psychotic symptoms which might justify a certificate of insanity.” When Ann asks what made her try to kill herself, Miller answers “(after a slight pause) She wanted to die, I suppose.” Again, this hints at black comedy, although he suspects she “probably will try again, and try again very soon.”

There has been considerable criticism levelled at Rattigan (as there is to E.M. Forster in The Inheritance) that he wasn’t open enough about his sexuality – it was illegal to be homosexual – and that he writes coded characters, such as Mr Miller. Many people at the time (and me) thought that the reason Miller couldn’t practice as a doctor was because he had performed an abortion (also illegal), but modern interpretation believes it is because he was discovered to be gay. Attempted suicide was also illegal in the 1950s. Miller insists he is not a doctor although he has all the credentials, and he mocks Collyer with his understanding of patient confidentiality. “Yes, I’ve heard of it. It’s much the same as the English schoolboy’s code, isn’t it? No sneaking.”

 

Rattigan had a relationship with a man who tried to end his life through gassing himself and failed – but this doesn’t mean that he has made Hester a male stand-in and written in code about homosexuality. It is a lot deeper and more complex than that, as Rebellato explains, “Homosexuality, then, was explored and experienced through a series of semi-hidden, semi-open codes of behaviour; the image of the iceberg, with the greater part of its bulk submerged beneath the surface, was frequently employed. And this image is, of course, one of the metaphors often used to describe Rattigan’s own playwriting.” He is criticised for smuggling furtively homosexual themes into his plays and for lacking the courage to confess to his sexuality both in his plays and his writing – the devil and the deep blue sea, indeed.

 

The fear and repression in palpable. In his obituary of Rattigan, Michael Billington wrote, “His whole work is a sustained assault on English middle class values; fear of emotional commitment, terror in the face of passion, apprehension about sex.” Rebellato argues, “There are traces of gay experience running through The Deep Blue Sea. The set itself strongly captures the continual fear of exposure felt by so many homosexual men and women. The room with a communal stairwell right outside the door is positioned to encourage a constant awareness of surveillance, with characters perusing each other’s letters, exchanging gossip, and overhearing one another’s conversations.”

 

The letter Hester writes to Freddie is passed around and becomes a plot device, typical of the ‘well-made play’. Rebellato feels, “There is a fluidity and subtlety in the way that Rattigan has the suicide note pass from the mantlepiece to the Welches, then into the pocket of Hester’s dressing gown, and finally into the hands of Freddie. Rattigan expertly misdirects us, so that we have forgotten about the letter, until Freddie’s desire for a cigarette leads him to stumble across it... The same confidence and theatrical economy marks Rattigan’s use of the shilling which Freddie cruelly offers Hester, ‘Just in case I’m late for dinner’, and which lies on the table until Hester picks it up in preparation for her second suicide attempt. Through these devices… Rattigan not only creates a satisfyingly taut theatrical unity, but reminds us of the dangerous atmosphere in which these characters live, in which everything is charged with meaning, and where objects and actions are constantly scrutinised, judged and battled over.” If we can stop comparing this to Osborne (as if they were both trying to write the same play) and appreciate it for its own merit, we must conclude that this is a very fine play indeed.

Against All Odds: In Memoriam

In Memoriam by Alice Winn

Viking (2023)

Pp. 375

In Memoriam is reminiscent of Atonement and Testament of Youth as it covers the doomed generation of young men who went to war and never returned, either because they were killed or changed irrevocably. Also discernible are elements of Pat Barker’s Ghost Road novel, wherein, like the WWI poetry we all studied in school with the benefit of hindsight and distance, we can plot the way innocence, ideology and excitement turned to disgust, betrayal, anger and frustration. Our characters transform from schoolboys worried about their families and duty to wounded and embittered cynics whose promise was destroyed by a class system into which they had no input. And at its heart it is a love story between Gaunt and Ellwood, two young men coming of age in a time when homosexuality was still illegal.

Winn writes in linear style, with sharp, clear sentences, avoiding excessive adjectives, but with a profoundly moving poetry. Beginning in a public school, the use of last names and lack of sentiment suggests a world of staunch young classically educated men with notions of empire and glory. Word of the deaths begins to reach the schoolboys back in England – those who hadn’t lied about their age to sign up – and are reported in their school newspaper, The Preshutian. The reports begin cheerily: every man killed dies ‘gallantly in battle’ with a smile and a quip, proud to serve his country. Later, after The Somme, there are just lists of the dead, and the commentary becomes much more sombre. “After the calamity of the past four years, we look to the future with hope, determined to make Cyril’s sacrifice, and that of a thousand others, count towards a lasting harmony in Europe. Let us, like the soldiers of Waterloo, have our century of peace and prosperity, for we have paid for it in blood.”

The irony of hindsight brings poignancy to scenes and situations. “Loos hung over them, a word he felt sure would someday have black meaning, but now was only a whisper of dread in his stomach.” There are echoes of Blackadder Goes Forth in the trench talk, where there is resentment of the upper class automatically being made officers and promoted to captains, having authority over men much older and more experienced than them. One character exclaims bitterly, “My school didn’t train me to rule an empire”, and when he is told they are more realistically losing an empire, another character interjects, “What rot! Losing the empire – look at how the Gurkhas fight! They love England just as much as we do, anyone can see that.” Meanwhile the men are falling without class distinction in a horrifically mundane manner. “At nine, they went over the top. West’s head was shot off before they had gone two feet. Elwood paused to look at his brains. Pritchard had always said he didn’t have any, but there they were, grey and throbbing and clotted with blood.”

Poetry is present in the straightforward descriptions of the terrain, “The rain came down in ropes. They climbed quietly out of the trenches and crawled through the poisonous, corpse-studded No Man’s Land. It was usually silent, but tonight, the thousands of wounded groaned like a ship in a storm.” The situation becomes so surreal that there is no equivalent behaviour. “They did not even run, but plodded to their deaths, like – There was no comparison. No animal on earth would have suffered it. No creature would walk so knowingly, so hopelessly into the jaws of death.”

The section set in a prisoner of war camp is almost a comic diversion. “It’s astonishing how well an English boarding school prepares one for prison.” All the prisoners are bored, chatty and trying to escape, while the guards are generally good-natured and long-suffering. “The men spent their time galloping around the dining hall, antagonising the guards, reading and rereading Adam Bede, and, most notably, plotting elaborate escapes.” They are happy to assist each other, as Gaunt notes, “It was much easier to be brave for your friends than for yourself.”

After years of erotically-charged friendship, Gaunt and Ellwood finally admit their love for each other. “A sudden, dry bleakness spread over Gaunt’s heart as he thought of Hercules and Hector, and all the heroes in myth who found happiness briefly, only for it not to be the end of the story.” Gaunt and Ellwood are subsequently separated and assume each other’s death, yet love persists despite all, in a romance like that in The Bronze Horseman by Paullina Simons. As in The Imitation Game, men who fought for their country are not accepted there due to their sexuality, so many of them leave and go to Brazil. “Gaunt thought of the darkling plain, of skating in the winter, of crunching over frosted grass early in the morning, of bluebell meadows in spring. There was nothing he wanted more than to spend the rest of his life on Wiltshire country lanes, Elwood at his side. It was what he had fought for, what his friends had died for.”

In Memoriam is Alice Winn’s debut novel. It may not be an original topic, but it is excellently written. She writes captivatingly about things of which she can have no first-hand experience: life in the trenches, male sex, and English public schools with a ring of authenticity. I look forward to her next offering.

Casual Cruelty and Deep Unhappiness: The Mystery of Love

The Mystery of Love by Andrew Meehan

Head of Zeus

Pp. 247

Subtitled, Constance and Oscar: A Novel, this reads as if Constance has written it (but in omniscient third person) and Oscar has provided footnotes and comments from prison. Her tone is practical and her writing as in a diary, full of capitals and ampersands. His is flamboyant and full of criticism and narcissism, interrupting her story – as he must have done in life – by suddenly introducing his affair with Robbie as an entertaining anecdote rather than as an admission of adultery to his wife. Constance wants to escape from suffocating existence and sees marriage to Oscar as a way to do this; she is hoping for intimacy but is not blinded by his brilliance and comes to see him as two different people. She refers to OW, the performer, who is intense but exhausting, and Oscar, the man behind closed doors, whom she loves with all his frustrating imperfections. “Oh for goodness’ sake, she said. Clever people are such exhausting company. Thankfully you’re only clever in public. & if you’re here to propose marriage, let’s get on with it.”

Oscar’s mother, Lady Jane Wilde (LJW) knows her son is gay and that his relationship with Constance will be purely for show and for progeny. “The week before the wedding, LJW had invited her for dank tea in a darkened room &, if it were possible to be both cryptic & overly direct, had spoken at length about syphilis & the absence of a cure for it.” Later, Constance has occasion to remark about LJW and her unwanted opinions, “It was impossible to ever know if the woman was being helpful or just plain vicious.” Constance may not be swept up in romance, but she does want to change her life. It’s reminiscent of the relationship between Romeo and Juliet where he spouts the romantic poetry and she is keen to get on with the physical aspects. He seems more interested than her dress than her desires; her appearance rather than her appetites, so she tells him, “Sex isn’t everything, Oscar. But it is something.” She is aware that something might be missing from the relationship but does not question it too deeply at the beginning.

The single-minded need to have children and remove herself from her upbringing causes Constance to sacrifice many idealistic notions. “Better not to consider other weddings in the middle of your own. For this was a gathering with all the vivacity of a queue for meat pies.” Oscar doesn’t enjoy the sex, as she learns on her wedding night, “But it delighted her that he would put himself through something he didn’t enjoy just to please her. How could he bring himself to do something he hated? So many delights in one day. This was how she knew he loved her.” This unlikely prose reads like a man writing a woman who has never actually talked to a woman. Oscar’s foot notes describe how he tried to imagine something interesting when with her, in much the same way as he did when he masturbated, which is incredibly offensive considering OW is meant to have and empathy.

Constance and son, Cyril

Once Constance does have children, she discovers they are not the solution to providing happiness, and she doesn’t adore them as some might expect a mother would. “You couldn’t just squirt out child after child in the hope that it would make you feel better about yourself. What were children for? To make the days so very long as well as fraught with danger.”

Committed to the Rational Dress Movement, Constance is critical of restrictive women’s fashion. “Was it such a crime to be able to move your arm in what you wore? What if she would be required to bowl a ball or paint a picture? But her aunt would not be told that a crinoline was a fire hazard. & what if she were to fall under the wheels of a carriage? It was like walking around with a building attached to you.”

Rational Dress Society cartoon

Forgiveness and humility radiate from Constance, as she is persistent and determined to make things work. “Marriages don’t fail. The arrangements just change.” She has no rancour over her position as a woman publicly humiliated by her husband’s homosexual affair and imprisonment, and reflects, “Oscar is not a bad person. In the eyes of the law he behaved wrongly, & for one so clever he was certainly a bit dim to bring all this upon himself.”

The author tries to steer the reader away from pitying Constance her plight by suggesting that isn’t how she feels about herself and that she was never deluded. There is a myth about the wronged woman that he seeks to dispel with a touch too much protestation. Oscar’s final footnote is to comment, “For I have caused you so much pain & given the chance I would cause you more.” Despite trying to re-balance the narrative and claim the outsider knows nothing about the internal workings of a marriage, Meehan hasn’t imagined a particularly credible character and this remains a miserable book full of casual cruelty and deep unhappiness.