About the Play:

The Deep Blue Sea was one of Royal National Theatre of Britain's top 100 plays of the 20th century.

The Deep Blue Sea is a full-length drama by Terence Rattigan. A married woman leaves her husband for a passionate but ultimately destructive relationship with a young pilot left psychologically damaged by the war. The Deep Blue Sea is a compassionate masterpiece that contains one of the greatest female roles in contemporary drama.

The Deep Blue Sea is a powerful account of lives blighted by love – or the lack of it. Hester Collyer's husband is a rich, talented lawyer; her lover, Freddie, a former fighter pilot who has wasted his life since the end of the war, is neither Hester's moral nor intellectual equal, but Hester loves him with an intensity that few, and especially not Freddie, are capable of matching. They are death to each other. Hester is driven to attempt suicide. Between the devil and the deep blue sea the latter looks very attractive. Written in the early 1950s when Terence Rattigan was at the height of his powers, The Deep Blue Sea dives into themes of love, loss and isolation as Hester grapples with her unfulfilled marriage to a high court judge and her deep, obsessive love for Freddie. She is saved by Miller, a disgraced doctor working as a volunteer in a hospital, and through him learns how to transcend both hope and despair. This edition includes an authoritative introduction, biographical sketch and chronology.

The Deep Blue Sea was first performed at the Duchess Theatre in London in 1952 and received immediate critical acclaim. It has since received numerous revivals.

Cast: 3 female, 5 male

What people say:

"The Deep Blue Sea is the finest play by Terence Rattigan and a perceptive drama about a relationship where both parties suffer because of an inequality of passion." — The Independent

"Rattigan [is] an inheritor of Ibsen's mantle, a visionary about the circumstances that imprison people." — The Guardian

"It is deeply disturbing and exquisitely moving. More than once it penetrates the heart's innermost places." — The Daily Express

"Few dramatists of this century have written with more understanding of the human heart than Terence Rattigan." — Michael Billington

About the Playwright:

Sir Terence Rattigan (1911-1977) was a popular English dramatist who wrote some of the most memorable and important plays of the twentieth century. His plays are generally situated within an upper-middle-class background. He was that relative rarity among the ranks of playwrights: a major theatre author who was almost equally successful as a screenwriter, and one of a very few playwrights of his era privileged to adapt his own stage work to the screen on a regular basis.