The Deep Blue Sea: Venus Loses Adonis

Abstract

Rattigan continues his engagement with Shakespeare by using Venus and Adonis as the skeleton of his play The Deep Blue Sea, which may be summarized as a Racinian plot as follows: a woman tries to prevent her lover from leaving her; he leaves her. Shakespeare’s narcissistic Adonis has one obsession while Venus tries to keep him dallying with her: to be with his male comrades on the boar hunt. Rattigan translates Adonis into a carefree, nonreflective, self-absorbed ex-Royal Air Force pilot. Adonis is killed by the boar after he leaves Venus, and the play strongly suggests that Freddie, having taken a job in South America as a test pilot, will meet his doom that way because he’s too old and too much of a drinker to survive such a dangerous activity. Hester’s tragedy is Venus’s: “She’s Love, she loves, and yet she is not loved.” Hester, though, after two suicide attempts and with the help of an ex-doctor (an exile from polite society as Hester is), learns to live beyond hope—by giving herself over to the making of paintings and art. Rattigan makes this play one of his most personal statements about his tragic sense of life and what his art represented to him. The final scene where Hester says goodbye to Freddie is an apogee of Rattigan’s art of understatement: all stillness, low voices, resignation to unhappiness.