Reviewing the first production of Terence Rattigan’s Deep Blue Sea in 1952, Kenneth Tynan said it was about “two incompatible kinds of passion” and “the failure of two people to agree on a definition of love”. That’s true, but it’s too cool and abstract a summary of a piece that must be hot and human in performance. After all, Rattigan started writing the play after suffering a personal trauma: the death of an ex-lover who gassed himself after another affair had ended in failure.

Life and the censor being what they were in 1952, he had to translate things into heterosexual terms. Moreover, Hester Collyer, the judge’s wife who has absconded with a former RAF pilot, bungles her suicide, giving us one of the 20th century’s finest survival dramas and the theatre a terrific role for an actress who has both the “thoughtful, remote face” Rattigan wanted and a willingness to own up to humiliating emotion. And that’s a dual test Greta Scacchi passes: sometimes covering up her anguish, sometimes abjectly displaying it, in what even in the post-Diana era remains a very English battle between the stiff upper lip and the tripes below.

The event that precipitated Hester’s suicide attempt is small but symptomatic. Her lover, Dugald Bruce-Lockhart’s Freddie Page, has forgotten her birthday. But for her and Rattigan that dramatises the problem: for Freddie love is a comfort, recreation or hobby, like his golf, while for Hester it’s all-consuming. Told by the married nerd who shares their dowdy digs that love is petty unless it’s “spiritual”, Scacchi exudes a sort of exhausted contempt. Told by Freddie that he’s leaving her, she succumbs to a breathless, choking despair: “Don’t leave me tonight.”

Has the piece dated? When Simon Williams as Hester’s husband talks of her conjugal duty one might think so, but Rattigan is fair-minded enough to make him wiser, warmer, more forgiving than 1950s convention might dictate.

What’s unusual in Edward Hall’s fine revival – just arrived from a national tour – is Bruce-Lockhart’s playing of Freddie. Though he ends up weeping on the landing that’s half-visible from his and Hester’s room, he’s less the clumsy ex-hero, more the killer who plugged Huns from a Spitfire: tough, callous, and quick to see Hester’s near-suicide as a threat to his reputation rather than a cry for help.

For a cry for help it is, and more, much more. To witness Scacchi’s face crumple and her voice become a stricken yelp is to know not only that, but that Rattigan understood an awful lot about passion, pain, grief and England.

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