The Deep Blue Sea - TNT

Although the moral climate has changed, the overwhelming emotions portrayed in Terence Rattigan's 1952 drama (inspired by the suicide of his former lover, but transmuted into a heterosexual scenario) still ring painfully true. Having left her husband (a successful judge) for the charms of former RAF pilot Freddie, clergyman's daughter Hester is living in a shabby Ladbroke Grove rooming house. Now unemployed and drinking too much, he's incapable of reciprocating (and barely understands) her all-consuming passion. With logic and reason swept away, Greta Scacchi gives a riveting performance of humiliated middle-aged despair as Hester refuses to return to her loving spouse and tries, desperately, to keep Freddie by her side.
Vaudeville, Strand, WC2 (0870-040 0084). Until July 19. £21-£46