This week, London's Theatre Royal Haymarket welcomed the much-anticipated revival of The Deep Blue Sea', starring beloved actor Tamsin Grieg (Friday Night Dinner, Green Wing) as Hester Collyer.

Written by Terrence Rattigan in 1952, The Deep Blue Sea follows Hester Collyer, who after an unsuccessful suicide attempt, is left fighting between the idea of carrying on with her life. With her marriage to a respectable Magistrate in ruins after her affair with Freddie, a former spitfire pilot with more than a passing friendship with the bottle, she finds herself used and abandoned, living in a tenement house. Whilst there she meets Mr Miller, a doctor who was struck off for his homosexuality and the two, moved by each other's plight form a bond that saves them both.

Find out what the critics thought of this exciting new opening below!

REVIEWS

The Times

"Following in the footsteps of Peggy Ashcroft, Penelope Wilton and Helen McCrory, Tamsin Greig is the latest to tackle a part as filled with mordant wit as with vertiginous despair. In Lindsay Posner's artfully claustrophobic production, with its meticulously observed period detail, she delivers a performance as poised as it is lacerating, showing Hester unpicking others' delusions at the same time as she is destroyed by her own."

The Stage

"Tamsin Greig as a dry-humoured Hester, doing her best to smother her seismic emotions in a post-war stiff-upper-lip attitude, delivers a performance to match. As she slumps in an armchair with her back to her neighbours, or hovers rigid and wringing her hands, only her eyes betray her feelings, flickering in disapproval or shining with withheld tears. It's a beguiling interpretation that would surely impress melodrama-avoidant Rattigan as much as it does a contemporary audience."

"In Posner's staging, it's all devastatingly performed, with a powerful magnetism."

The Guardian

"Lindsay Posner's thoughtful production doesn't always maximise the intimacy, yet Rattigan's play clasps you by the wrist and holds on tight."

"The Deep Blue Sea doesn't do period glamour: it's frayed shirts, shoe polish, trudging on. Like all of Rattigan's best plays, it traces a very British misery shamed but stalwart, refusing to be furtive about sex and stormy weather."

The Telegraph

"The Friday Night Dinner star turns her comic gifts to modern tragedy, communicating a world of emotion with every expression"

"The challenge of any revival is to make us feel the atmosphere of repression, and depression, like a pea-souper. In this, Lindsay Posner's smartly attentive production has a terrific asset: Tamsin Greig."

"... Greig communicates with every expression, her default blankness a mask across which wounded pride, pensive concern and stabbing hurt mesmerisingly flicker."

Don't miss Greig' stunning performance - grab your tickets now!