‘You wiped the floor with me!’ Tamsin Greig and Oliver Chris are having a riot with Rattigan

They are comedy sparring partners from Green Wing. Can the duo play stricken lovers in The Deep Blue Sea, the eviscerating play Rattigan poured his own heartbreak into? Warning: contains spoilers

On 8 May 1956, Terence Rattigan stood outside the Royal Court theatre in London after the opening night of a revolutionary new drama. This was not one of his own plays but a sally from the upstart generation: John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger. Or, as the veteran playwright bitterly renamed it: Look How Unlike Terence Rattigan I’m Being. Refinement was out, the Angry Young Man was in, and the author of Separate Tables and The Winslow Boy had plummeted from favour.

But that all changed in 1993 – with Karel Reisz’s revival of The Deep Blue Sea, Rattigan’s most penetrating work. Penelope Wilton played Hester Collyer, who is separated from her husband, a primly patriarchal high court judge. She now lives in sin with her younger lover, the carousing ex-RAF pilot Freddie Page. The play begins with Hester’s listless body being discovered by her neighbours. She has tried to gas herself after Freddie failed to return for her birthday. (She would have succeeded had there been enough coins in the meter.) The rest of the day, and the play, is spent raking over the detritus of her life. Freddie bowls in obliviously; her husband tries to coax her back to the marital home; and the enigmatic former doctor, Miller, exhorts her to “go on living”.