SOURCE: Billington, Michael. “Rattigan Triumphant.” Manchester Guardian Weekly (24 January 1993): 26.

In the following positive review of the 1993 Almeida production, Billington examines Rattigan's portrayal of the inequity of passion in The Deep Blue Sea.

Forty years after its premiere Terence Rattigan's The Deep Blue Sea begins to look like a modern classic as timelessly true as Phaedre in its portrait of the inequality of passion. But the great irony, as Karel Reisz's meticulous new Almeida production proves, is that Rattigan, in attacking the undernourished English heart, fills the theatre with emotion.

Rattigan's mastery lies in showing the dilemma confronting his heroine, Hester Collyer, a judge's wife now living with a former test pilot in a dingy flat in Ladbroke Grove. Hester, a clergyman's daughter, has a sexual hunger that her husband clearly never satisfied and an emotional ardour that her current lover cannot return. As so often, Rattigan suggests that...