Danny & the Deep Blue Sea

Somewhere in the Bronx, in a scrappy, empty bar, a woman sits alone, her coiled, angry misery overlaying her striking looks.  A younger man slouches in with a jug of beer and sits at another table.  His knuckles are bloody, his face is cut and bruised, his hoodie dirty, his boots held together with gaffer tape.  They are two damaged isolates.  It will emerge that he fears he killed a man the night before.  His workmates call him ‘The Beast’ – and he is afraid of himself.  We realise she is contemplating suicide. There’s nowhere to go but up – and John Patrick Shanley will drag them there.  Through desperation, she forces communication.  It’s attack and retreat; it’s offence and defence; it’s the ebb and flow of emotion; confession and denial; offers made and withdrawn – and finally accepted.  Shanley himself subtitled his play ‘an Apache dance’.

But why revive this 1983 – and some would say ‘old-fashioned’ – play?  What the characters achieve in the end is possibly just a little contrived, a little willed, and do they perhaps advance and retreat over the same ground once or twice too often?  But the emotions of the text are still powerful and true, and it presents such great opportunities for actors.  When I mentioned to a theatre director friend that I’d be seeing this show, she said, ‘John Patrick Shanley stuff needs really good actors.’  Well, in this case, that’s what this play gets. 

Charlie Cousins, whom you might know in the rather thankless role of gentle Constable Charlie Davis in The Doctor Blake Mysteries (ABC), is the eponymous Danny.  He exudes confused, inchoate rage, violent menace and the most vulnerable yearning.  He’s frightening – and yet by the end, Mr Cousins makes us care deeply about this man even as we fear his lashing out again.

Laura Maitland – who astonishingly also co-directs – is Roberta, a woman of forty-one, a single mother, still living with her parent, and with – according to her – a f**ked-up son.  She’s weighed down by guilt over an action in the past, and the conviction that she is a bad person, but so lonely she will take an extraordinary risk to connect with this patently dangerous man.  Ms Maitland and Mr Cousins direct themselves in their circling and crashing and violent sexuality, but Ms Maitland is herself excellent: febrile, aggressive, dangerously crazy-brave and provocative and yet with tiny, enticing glimpses of sweetness and humour.  She is, indeed, the ‘deep blue sea’ – or has it inside her, a secret realm, which she opens to him.  It’s a quicksilver performance, which, counterweighted by Mr Cousins’ slow but explosive burn, holds us through this rollercoaster ride.

(On our night, the applause of the audience – restricted to fifteen - brought the actors back on stage for a second bow.  They seemed touchingly amazed.)

Making the most of what are clearly limited resources, Pia Guilliatt’s design for the bar and, in Act II, Roberta’s bedroom work well enough, although the bar may be a touch over-dressed.  Ashleigh Barnett’s lighting faces the challenge of the set being real rooms with real windows, but she exploits this cleverly, especially her ‘cold light of day’ in the play’s ultimate sequence.  The program doesn’t tell us who did the sound design, but it’s a naturalistic street or port ‘atmos track’ (traffic, industrial grind, horns and sirens) and there’s too much of it at too great a volume.

What Danny & the Deep Blue Sea gives us through two sustained, concentrated performances is the charting of the wayward emotions of two scarred, frightened people simultaneously fighting each other off and groping their way toward each other.  Maybe it is ‘old-fashioned’, but it is powerful and absolutely absorbing. 

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Pier Carthew