The Deep Blue Sea starring Tamsin Greig – Reviews Round-up

"Devastatingly performed"

"Tamsin Greig is beguiling in Lindsay Posner’s intimate revival of Terence Rattigan’s masterpiece on unrequited love"

"Lindsay Posner’s production feels almost invasive in its penetration of Hester Collyer’s front room: a private space blown open to the public following her suicide attempt. This intensity means each line carries triple its weight in meaning, the subtext ringing out."

"Tamsin Greig as a dry-humoured Hester, doing her best to smother her seismic emotions in a post-war stiff-upper-lip attitude, delivers a performance to match. As she slumps in an armchair with her back to her neighbours, or hovers rigid and wringing her hands, only her eyes betray her feelings, flickering in disapproval or shining with withheld tears. It’s a beguiling interpretation that would surely impress melodrama-avoidant Rattigan as much as it does a contemporary audience."

"In Posner’s staging, it’s all devastatingly performed, with a powerful magnetism."

"Tamsin Greig’s Rattigan revival is claustrophobic and needle-sharp"

"The Friday Night Dinner star turns her comic gifts to modern tragedy, communicating a world of emotion with every expression"

"The challenge of any revival is to make us feel the atmosphere of repression, and depression, like a pea-souper. In this, Lindsay Posner’s smartly attentive production has a terrific asset: Tamsin Greig."

"... Greig communicates with every expression, her default blankness a mask across which wounded pride, pensive concern and stabbing hurt mesmerisingly flicker."

"Though it has been very hard to step into this role since the late Helen McCrory’s powerhouse turn at the National in 2016, Greig makes it her own, helped by the compactness of the Ustinov."

"A dab more Rattiganesque restraint and a very good revival could become a great one."

"Tamsin Greig is lacerating in this love triangle"

"Terence Rattigan’s play about a woman adrift in an unhappy love affair is performed by a superb cast in Theatre Royal Bath’s Ustinov Studio"

"Following in the footsteps of Peggy Ashcroft, Penelope Wilton and Helen McCrory, Tamsin Greig is the latest to tackle a part as filled with mordant wit as with vertiginous despair. In Lindsay Posner’s artfully claustrophobic production, with its meticulously observed period detail, she delivers a performance as poised as it is lacerating, showing Hester unpicking others’ delusions at the same time as she is destroyed by her own."

"Greig brilliantly conveys a woman calcified by misery — her brittle sophistication gives the sense that if you tapped her too hard she would disintegrate to dust."

"Nicholas Farrell gives a finely calibrated performance as Hester’s ex-husband, Sir William Collyer, a judge whose attempts at humanity are stifled by patrician superiority. Oliver Chris is perhaps a little too gung ho as Freddie, the young pilot who, like Hester, is utterly lost in life."

"Tamsin Greig adds bite to Terence Rattigan"

"As a woman who has left her husband for a dissolute younger man in postwar London, Greig’s quiet despair compels"

"Lindsay Posner’s thoughtful production doesn’t always maximise the intimacy, yet Rattigan’s play clasps you by the wrist and holds on tight."

"The Deep Blue Sea doesn’t do period glamour: it’s frayed shirts, shoe polish, trudging on. Like all of Rattigan’s best plays, it traces a very British misery – shamed but stalwart, refusing to be furtive about sex and stormy weather."