SOURCE: Spencer, Charles. “Mysteries of the Human Heart: Charles Spencer on an Outstanding Revival of a Rattigan Classic.” The Daily Telegraph (15 January 1993): 17.

In the following review, Spencer notes the honesty and tenderness in The Deep Blue Sea.

In one of his last plays Terence Rattigan wrote: “Do you know what le vice anglais really is? Not flagellation, not pederasty. It's our refusal to admit to our emotions.” But this English reserve, the determination to keep a stiff upper lip in the face of an unbearable depth of feeling, is what makes his masterpiece, The Deep Blue Sea (1952), such an overwhelming dramatic experience. It is a play about destructive sexual love in which the word sex isn't even mentioned. One of the characters, offering clumsy sympathy, speaks awkwardly of “the physical side” and that's as near as anyone gets to describing what people actually get up to in bed...