The Writing of The Deep Blue Sea
The Deep Blue Sea by Terence Rattigan
Theatr Clwyd, 1996
Terence Rattigan
“The play will open with the body discovered dead in front of the gas fire.”
Terence Rattigan spoke these words to the director Peter Glenville three years to the month before The Deep Blue Sea opened in London. He had just been informed that his ex-lover, the actor Ken Morgan, had gassed himself in despair over his latest relationship. While Rattigan the man was shattered, the playwright in him was already at work on how best he could turn this dramatic situation to account to help him deal with the tragedy.
The central theme of a lover consumed by passion for another incapable of returning it in equal measure had been part of Rattigan’s psyche for some time. Just after the war he had broken with flamboyant MP ‘Chips’ Channon whose all-consuming possessiveness had begun to get him down. Almost immediately the playwright himself became strongly attracted to Ken Morgan, the attractive young actor who had played Babe Lake in the 1939 film French Without Tears. Although there had been no fireworks at the time of their earlier working relationship, Rattigan had found himself deeply smitten. He persuaded Morgan to move in with him and proceeded to shower attention and gifts on this new companion, seeking to buy his love the way Channon had sought to secure his own. And with similar results. The more ardent Rattigan grew, the less responsive the recipient became.
It was a dilemma Rattigan was aware of but which he was powerless to check. He was obliged to keep his affairs discreet because at that time blackmail and persecutions for homosexuality were not uncommon. Such enforced emotional repression was the theme of The Browning Version, his first big post-war success which clearly showed that while honesty is necessary for complete emotional fulfilment, in certain circumstances it will eventually, and inevitably, bring pain.
By late 1948 the relationship was deteriorating. Morgan was chafing to get on with his career, not content to be simply the companion of a rich and famous playwright, charming and generous though that man undoubtedly was. Then during the pre-West End tour of Adventure Story, Rattigan’s ambitious drama on the life of Alexander the Great, Morgan became drawn to someone else and moved out to a flat in Camden Town. Rattigan thought the affair would blow over but in March 1951, on tour with Adventure Story in Liverpool, news reached him that Ken Morgan had committed suicide. Guilt and remorse wracked him in equal parts, and this one event would cloud all his other relationships in years to come.
Things weren’t helped by the ‘gallant failure’ of Adventure Story. To overcome these combined griefs Rattigan threw himself into work, producing his next stage play Who is Sylvia?, based loosely on his father’s diplomatic affaires; The Final Test, his first TV play for the BBC; and the screenplay for David Lean’s film The Sound Barrier, which was nominated for an Oscar.
In the meantime the story of what would eventually become The Deep Blue Sea was slowly maturing in his mind. Not surprisingly, it proved to be one of Rattigan’s most difficult plays to write due to his close personal involvement with the theme. The central relationship in the first draft was a homosexual one, but by the time the final draft was completed in December 1950, no trace of that genesis remained.
It was Rattigan himself who offered the part to Peggy Ashcroft, like himself another survivor of John Gielgud’s production of Romeo and Juliet at Oxford. Having just completed a series of somewhat heavy roles in plays like Edward, My Son and The Heiress, the actress was looking forward to a light comedy from the hand of a master. But as Rattigan outlined the plot to her over lunch, her first reaction was of disappointment. On reading the play she found Hester Collyer selfish and unsympathetic. But eventually the producer Binkie Beaumont persuaded her to take the part and by the end of the rehearsal period she had become Hester’s committed champion, defending her character and actions against all-comers.
As for the other key role of Freddie Page, the director Frith Banbury favoured Jimmy Hanley. Then one day Roland Culver, cast as Sir Willian Collyer, played a round of golf with a rising young actor who he thought possessed the necessary qualities. Kenneth More was duly called in to read. Frith Banbury told him, “Here you are. You’re Freddie Page. He’s a sexy young man. This woman is mad about him, not because of his looks or his background, but because of his sex. Now go ahead: read.” Not surprisingly, given a brief like that, More was unable to give of his best. But Rattigan felt his personality was right for the part. He invited the actor to a second reading at his Albany flat, relaxed him with a couple of whiskies, and this time Page came off the page, as breezy and confident as the playwright had made him.
Rehearsals proceeded with the playwright in attendance but only to rubberstamp what alterations the actors suggested: “Once I’ve made any corrections to the script that I think are right and are agreed on, I wash my hands of the play. It’s in the hands of the director and the actors.” Act III required the most work and he calculated that by the time the play opened he must have written seven complete versions of it. Even then it was to prove the most problematical point of the whole piece.
After a brief try-out at Brighton, The Deep Blue Sea opened at the little Duchess Theatre, London on 6 March 1952 where it ran for 513 performances. Rattigan’s painstaking work on this most deeply personal of themes had paid off. He had succeeded on creating a strong and powerful central role for a woman, in the rare tradition of Ibsen’s Nora Helmer in A Doll’s House, and it further contained the clearest and most moving demonstration of his tough humanism: as the shadowy Dr Miller says, “To live without hope can mean to live without despair.”
It was immediately hailed as Rattigan’s finest full-length play to date. Peggy Ashcroft was a hit, it made a star of Kenneth More, and re-established Rattigan as Britain’s most important playwright. At curtain fall the first-night audience burst into prolonged cheers while the critics the following morning were unanimous in their praise – not least the previously sceptical Kenneth Tynan who had had some harsh things to say about the dramatist in earlier days. The Deep Blue Sea completed – for the time being at least – his conversion to Rattigan. He called it “the most absorbing new English play for many seasons” and “the most striking play I could remember”. Only the final act proved “intolerable”, a criticism Rattigan swiftly rejected, and one which he found himself obliged repeatedly to defend in the years to come. Any ending other than the one he had provided, he said, would have been conventional and a sop to the audience’s expectations.
Not that any of this was to cut much ice on Broadway where the play opened in the Morosco Theatre on 5 November that same year. Although it was the vehicle which successfully re-introduced the actress Margaret Sullavan to the stage after an absence of seven years, American audiences saw little more in it than high-class soap opera. It closed after just 132 performances.
Rattigan’s instinct not to open on Broadway, which had at one time been on the cards, was proved correct. The Deep Blue Sea, for all it has to say about the destructive power of passion and the need to find a life beyond it, is also a portrait of Britian in the aftermath of the Second World War. It is a time of boarding houses and young professionals, war heroes living on the glories of the past and unable to find their niche in the world they helped save. The society it depicts is still one straitened by circumstance and stiff with prejudice. But above all the play shows in clear-eyed detail a country which in its narrow-minded pettiness would never have countenanced the play Rattigan originally conceived, but which, in its cosy and middle-brow and middle-class way, was happy to take to its heart the one he finally wrote.
[click here for a biography of Terence Rattigan]