Word: sullavan
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...Deep Blue Sea (by Terence Rattigan) has seldom given off a fishier smell. Rattigan has tackled a grim moment in a woman's life, and has striven manfully to make a big afternoon of it for large audiences of other, less unfortunate women. Margaret Sullavan has returned to Broadway to play the bedeviled lady who twice turns on the gas, but who has no better luck at dying than (until the last few minutes) at making a go of life...
Bedeviled Actress Sullavan assuredly is: for love, she has left her high-placed dullard of a husband, only to find that her cheap, shallow, pleasure-seeking lover is about to walk out on her. Hers being an intense nature and a desperate passion, she can neither face her lover's desertion nor about-face into her husband's arms. It is a situation where the circumstances are shoddy, and only the consequences tragic...
...Deep Blue Sea, which brings Margaret Sullavan back to the American stage after a semi-retirement of eight years, is a tense, introspective drama of emotional conflict which looks from here to be as ill-fated as many of its predecessors from across the Atlantic. Its success in London may have been due in part to playright Terence Rattigan's gift for easy dialogue and his mastery of subtle character analysis, two qualities dear to the hearts of British theatre-goers. But deep down, beneath the morass of complex personal relationships, the play is without core. Rattigan guides his characters...
...Miss Sullavan's role is the focal point in the play's hierarchy of emotional maturity. She is caught between the Devil (her insistance upon viewing her unstable marital relations through the eyes of an insensitive society) and the Deep Blue Sea (or death, which she believes to be the only escape). The play opens with her attempted suicide and progresses through her relationships with her lover, her estranged husband, and an ex-doctor who ultimately proves to be her saviour. Though loosely constructed, the plot is not without tension and suspense. Mr. Rattigan's terrific seriousness accounts for much...
...acting is in most cases excellent, and in the role of the cynical German doctor, played by Herbert Berghof, it is superb. Miss Sullavan is perhaps a shade too theatrical, maintaining the level of emotion at a pitch which must be shattered in the play's denouement. James Hanley's portrayal of the lover, steeped in social mores and incapable of matching his mistress' passion, alternates effectively between flippancy and noble resignment. Perhaps the one flaw in character analysis--whether through script or through Alan Webb's portrayal--is that of the jilted husband; one can never believe that...