The Deep Blue Sea, National Theatre

That sounds great. I was speaking to a friend last weekend and we thought that Helen McCrory could be the lead since she worked before with Carrie Cracknell. To make the most of this sudden gist of prescience, I will buy a crystal ball and read the future of fellow bloggers in the foyer of the National Theatre in the weekends...

I wonder if Carrie Cracknell will use dancing in the production?

Film was very disappointing, it cut out all the light and shade/humour from the play. Give it a go, it's a great play and McCrory will be ace.

Penelope Wilton and Linus Roache in the production I saw at the Almeida, although I was staggered to read it was 1993:
www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/may/25/great-performances-penelope-wilton-the-deep-blue-sea

Natasha Richardson was in another sea-play there, The Lady from the Sea, 2003.

Ugh. I wish their first choice had said yes. Mrs Lewis = wild horses.

It's a very good play but revived very often. Think I saw it with Greta Scacchi? I do wish they'd give us a chance of seeing Rattigans which haven't been performed in decades, sometimes since the first production.

If Helen McCrory wasn't the first choice, I wonder who it was, am I right in thinking Hestor is in her early 40's - In that case I would have liked to see Nancy Carroll, but then not everyone likes her either.

Extra dates now on sale with lots of £15 seats.

This is very good. Be aware, you have to be a mature human being, which I struggle with, to fully appreciate it.

What I mean by this is that most of Rattigan's plays have far more comic relief than this one does, when dealing with essentially the same subject.

The subject, and I think Rattigan is always marvellous on it, is the impossibility of love. Rattigan never ever pretends he knows anything about it, just describes it's enormous power and it's devastating consequences.

Recalling other recent wonderful Rattigan revivals: in "French without Tears," noone could figure out how to love AND be happy, except the guy who slept exclusively with prostitutes. But that was a trenchant and hilarious comedy of manners, so the bitterness of Rattigan's essential message never stung. In "After the Dance," characters were severely stung, but at least we, the audience, had Adrian Scarborough's loveable comic relief character to mediate our misery, from his couch. In "Flare Path," Rattigan found a way of side-stepping love's conundrum by trumping it's misery with the grit and cameraderie of the (more important) war effort. And while poor old Crocker-Harris wasn't in the happiest of marriages, in "The Browning Version," at least we approached him at a distance, from the humour and outside vantage point of his students. With all these plays, there was some counterpoint to the sheer misery of being ineffectual in love, of never being able to balance passion and tenderness, of being caught in an inescapable trap.

This production traps you from the start, and won't let go. Although there are moments of comic relief, and they are wonderfully realised, especially by Marion Bailey's landlady, Mrs. Elton, they are little more than oases in a desrt, and for the most part, we sit and suffer with Helen McCrory's Hester Collyer's agony for a full 2 hours and forty minutes.

Luckily, Carrie Cracknell aids her audience in entering the requisite mood of deep seriousness, with an unassuming but sombre soundtrack that conditions the mind to relax, and away from relieving dramatic tension by inappropriate laughter. I didn't here any of that, so she succeeded. The visuals are big and blue and expansive, as we take in McCrory's scarlet-lettered Hester in the context of the world of her apartment block, able to see other occupants moving up and down stairs at the top of the set behind her.

McCrory inhabits Hester thoroughly, such that we never doubt one single thing she does, and Cracknell blocks her action around the large set of her flat elegantly. Small details add and add up to create utter disconsolation. In one of my favourite detailed moments, Hester simply lies on the floor, just where she was standing, when she finds herself alone.

Peter Sullivan effectively embodies the decency and repression of Hester's husband, William, with a dry delivery that recalls "Brief Encounter." Tom Burke's Freddie Page swings between passion and sang froid, in a moment. But it is Helen McCrory who once again shows what a terrific actress she is, able as she is to suggest a raging torrent of torment and resignation, by the slightest hesitation in responding to a question. One hopes that something of her nuanced performance carries to the back of this enormous theatre.

For a fleeting moment, McCrory and Cracknell brought out the adult in me that I didn't know was there.

4 stars

Steve, we were at the same show!! If only you'd posted it in the This Week I am Going to... thread - or if only I had. Where were you sitting, if I may ask? I was in the middle stalls, row M, next to the good-looking brunette.

As to the play, I'm even more than usually interested in your take because mine was unfortunately affected by having seen Kenny Morgan at the Arcola last week. I knew the two plays were closely related - KM being the story behind TDBS - but I hadn't realized that they were virtually identical, sharing characters and structure to the degree that I knew exactly what was coming next last night. Even little bits of business - cleaning Freddie's shoes, such a poignant moment - were appropriated by Mike Poulton for his play which I now have to consider at least as much an adaptation as an original work.

So everything for me was coloured by that. And let me say it here - I think the story works better with a male protagonist, the way it happened in "real life". Or at least it worked better for me at the Arcola with Paul Keating in the lead.

No knock against Helen McCrory who is an amazing actress and fully committed to Hester's desperation. This is a play, after all, about addiction, an addiction as strong and as deadly as that faced by Denise Gough's character in People, Places and Things. We can be addicted to people - especially people who, on some level or other, reject us. And it's frustrating to watch a character fall into that abyss and then choose to remain there when everyone around her is trying to help. But, of course, the point is that any help is futile and much of the humour of the piece - there is some - stems from that sad futility.

But, IMO, the stakes should have been higher in the sense that Freddie, Hester's younger lover and the source of her pain, should be much more of a cad. Tom Burke, another wonderful actor, was just loo likeable for me. Yes, he had his moments of incredible insensitivity that made the audience gasp - the shilling thing especially - but for me the gasps were not because the guy was a brute but because those moments seemed out of character. I could actually understand Hester's infatuation with Freddie - and I'm not sure I'm supposed to.

All this must be tempered by the fact that it played, to me, very much like a preview performance - there were missed cues, some stepping on lines, etc. - and the timing felt just slightly off. That will all improve, of course. I generally liked Carrie Cracknell's production - the transparent walls showing us life going on in the other flats was a nice effect at just the right moments. The actors were all excellent.

But, again, I'll never know how this play and this production would have affected me if it had been my introduction to the story. For me, the copy was the template - and, alas, that changed everything.

I was astonished by how poor Tom Hiddleston was in the movie. He was shooting for and missing a glowering Stanley Kowalski-lite but just seemed, I don't know, to be gurning a lot. Quite bizarre casting and to be honest that film put me off him as an actor for many years.