THE next in the season of NT Live satellite broadcasts direct from London to the big screen at the Regent Centre in Christchurch will be Terence Rattigan’s classic play The Deep Blue Sea, which is screened on Thursday, September 1 at 7pm.
Helen McCrory (Medea and The Last of the Haussmans at the National Theatre, Penny Dreadful, Peaky Blinders) returns to the National Theatre in Terence Rattigan’s devastating masterpiece, playing one of the greatest female roles in contemporary drama. Tom Burke (War and Peace, The Musketeers) also features in Carrie Cracknell’s critically acclaimed new production.
Deep Blue Sea is set in a flat in Ladbroke Grove in West London in 1952. When Hester Collyer is found by her neighbours in the aftermath of a failed suicide attempt, the story of her tempestuous affair with a former RAF pilot and the breakdown of her sterile marriage to a High Court judge begins to emerge.
Deep Blue Sea is a searing a portrait of need, loneliness and long-repressed passion set against the fragile veneer of post-war civility within which burns a brutal sense of loss and longing.
Hester realises that she cannot continue with the affair but neither can she return to her humdrum marriage.
To quote a Hester’s line: “When you’re between any kind of devil and the deep blue sea, the deep blue sea sometimes looks very inviting.”
Slowly, though, with the help of a disgraced doctor who lives in the same apartment block, Hester comes to see that there is life beyond the horizon.
n For more information or tickets please contact the Regent Centre on 01202 499199 or visit the website regentcentre.co.uk
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