THE DEEP BLUE SEA By Terence Rattigan
DANIEL EVANS AND KATHY BOURNE PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHAN PERSSON
WELCOME
Welcome to our second production – and first play – of the Minerva Theatre’s 2019 season, The Deep Blue Sea. Terence Rattigan’s plays have figured strongly in Chichester’s repertoire in recent years, mirroring the revival of interest in his work that Dan Rebellato charts in this programme. His centenary in 2011 was marked here not only by productions of The Deep Blue Sea and The Browning Version, but also David Hare’s response to the latter – South Downs – and Nicholas Wright’s Rattigan’s Nijinsky. Earlier revivals included Separate Tables and In Praise of Love. So why produce The Deep Blue Sea this season? In 2011 it was done in the 1,300-seat Festival Theatre (and the more recent National Theatre production was in the 900-seat Lyttelton); but it is set in a small flat in Ladbroke Grove,
so we thought it would be interesting for audiences to see how the play lives in the much more intimate setting of the Minerva. Equally, Hester is played by Nancy Carroll, who won the Olivier and Evening Standard Awards for Rattigan’s After the Dance at the National. She has waited to play this role until she’s the right age and to do it with her chosen director, Paul Foster. We’re thrilled they’re doing so at Chichester. We’re also delighted to welcome back Hadley Fraser, who last appeared here in The Pajama Game (2013); Gerald Kyd, who’s back in the Minerva following last year’s The Meeting; and the rest of the outstanding company. In what is bound to be a fascinating talk, Dan Rebellato will explore the history of The Deep Blue Sea in conversation with Alan Brodie on 27 July. Do join us for that, and we hope you enjoy this performance.
Executive Director Kathy Bourne
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Artistic Director Daniel Evans
WORLD PREMIERE
Haydn Gwynne
HEDDA TESMAN By Cordelia Lynn After Henrik Ibsen Cordelia Lynn breathes new life into Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, asking what we inherit, what we endure and how we carry our history. Holly Race Roughan directs this co-production with Headlong and The Lowry, with Haydn Gwynne in the title role.
30 August – 28 September #HeddaTesman
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A U T U M N 2 019
John Simm Dervla Kirwan
MACBETH By William Shakespeare Paul Miller directs John Simm and Dervla Kirwan in this contemporary production of Shakespeare’s great tragedy.
21 September – 26 October #Macbeth
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THE DEEP BLUE SEA By Terence Rattigan
LOCKED ROOM MYSTERIES: RATTIGAN ON THE EDGE Terence Rattigan’s rise and fall and rise again is a remarkable example of the fragility of theatrical reputations.
By the early 1950s, when The Deep Blue Sea had its premiere, no playwright in Britain was so deeply admired by the critics and audiences alike. Rattigan had burst into the public consciousness, seemingly out of nowhere, with French Without Tears in 1936, an exquisite joyful comedy about British expatriates trying and failing to learn a foreign language. Although he continued to write expertly light comedies over the next two decades, a richer, deeper emotional tone became increasingly evident in plays like After the Dance (1939), The Winslow Boy (1946), The Browning Version (1948), The Deep Blue Sea (1952) and Separate Tables (1954).
There is an exquisite theatrical choreography at work in all his plays. He moves his characters through space with the skill of a chess grandmaster. The emotional power of these plays was not, for Rattigan, contradicted by their tight formal construction. He had always paid precise attention to the mechanics of stagecraft; while this is perhaps more obviously needed in the comedies, there is an exquisite theatrical choreography at work in all his plays. Whether it is a farce like While the Sun Shines (1943) or a drama like The Deep Blue Sea, Rattigan moves his characters through space with the skill of a chess grandmaster and it is through this that he creates his most powerful effects. This is resolutely theatrical craft; Rattigan makes no pretensions to be a literary writer. He is interested in how a story unfolds in three-dimensional space before a live audience and there are few writers who can do that with his confidence. In While the Sun Shines, one of the funniest lines, that can bring an audience TERENCE RATTIGAN, VOGUE, 1947 IMAGE COURTESY OF GETTY IMAGES