[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 most relationships are founded on a one-sided passion and that the average English male is crippled by an incapacity to feel. Hester is confronted, therefore, by the choice between suicide or an imperfect life. For a model piece of dramatic writing, one has only to look at the final confrontation of Hester and her absconding lover, Freddie. Here are two people facing the destruction of a relationship and she asks “Had any food?” to which he replies “Yes. I had a bit at the Belvedere”. It is the ability to imply a wealth of unarticulated emotion bubbling away beneath the crust of English politeness that makes Rattigan such a superb dramatist.

Reisz and his designer, William Dudley, short-circuit the West End conventions in a number of ways. First, by placing the sitting room at an angle to the audience as if to suggest a life out of kilter. Secondly, by making the grey-green walls murkily transparent to convey the on-going life of the apartment block and to forewarn us of impending visitors.

But the play stands or falls by its Hester, and Penelope Wilton is much the best I have seen. Her flashes of smiling warmth towards her separated husband make you believe her natural habitat is an Eaton Square dinner table; yet her devouring kisses of Freddie, whom she artfully steers towards the bedroom, persuade you of her sensual hunger Wilton's great gift is for suggesting unexpressed emotion: I shall long remember the sight of her wan features, poised on the brink of tears, as the conscienceless Freddie breezes in after a weekend's golfing.

Linus Roache as Freddie is a shade youthful for an ex-fighter pilot whose life allegedly stopped in 1940. But here is first-rate support from Wojtek Pszoniak as the struck-off doctor who puts the case for life's continuance with wry matter-of-factness from Nicholas Jones as the well-meaning judge totally bemused by Hester's sexual zeal and from William Osborne as a preachy neighbour who tells Hester that life's physical side is “really awfully unimportant”.