At Circa 2 there’s playing at the moment an off-beat romantic comedy called Midsummer set in Edinburgh; at Bats there’s just opened an off-beat American romance set in a dim and dingy New York Bar.

These two productions have in common first rate performances which movingly and theatrically illuminate the common theme of the healing power of redemptive love. They both have optimistic endings despite having two damaged, lonely couples who one would have thought would have never ever got together in the first place.

An Apache Dance, John Patrick Shanley’s subtitle to Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, is a highly appropriate one particularly during the long first scene in the bar in which thirty-one year old Roberta, tortured by guilt and desperate to find a confessor, attempts to talk to a brooding, lone man at the next table.

Twenty-nine year old Danny is an even worse mess than she is and explodes in a mixture of fear, revulsion and violence at her tentative approaches. The dance becomes dangerous at one point but their relationship intensifies. They are both suffering from the American playwrights’ psychological fall-back position: bad relationships with fathers.

However, the scene has all the tension of Albee, Shepard, and O’Neill and it is played with Method-like rawness, intensity and verisimilitude by Vere Hampson-Tindale as Danny and Janelle Pollock as Roberta.

And then, after an awkward scene shift from bar to Roberta’s tiny bedroom, the play changes tack and while the playwright cleverly keeps the relationship between them chopping and changing, the psychological realism so seemingly strong in the bar scene becomes unbelievable, despite the convincing performances. 

In a sense the play is a fantasy that is strongly grounded in its American realism. A friend summed it up beautifully by describing the play as an urban fairytale and the quasi religious ending to Danny and the Deep Blue Sea bears out G.K. Chesterton’s comment that “There is the great lesson of Beauty and the Beast, that a thing must be loved before it is lovable.” An enjoyable, engrossing hour in the theatre. 

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer

A man and a woman meet in a bar. They’re at separate tables but they talk. He is battered and bruised from a fight and fears he might have killed someone. She’s done something terrible and ain’t gonna tell, no way. Until she does.

US playwright John Patrick Shanly, who went on to write Doubt (in response to 9/11 and the US decision to go to war with Iraq, in the apparent conviction that weapons of mass destruction existed and that violence could be cured with violence), premiered Danny and the Deep Blue Sea in 1983. Both plays are set in the Bronx.

Described in the media release as “a fairy tale for the damned”, it seems like a test, for him as a writer and us as an audience: create two deeply screwed up people who have overstepped moral boundaries to test our tolerance then see what it takes for us to buy into an impossibly romantic resolution. And dammit, he does it.

Despite all the calls for cutting edge technological innovation to keep theatre alive, there is still nothing like getting up close and personal with flawed humans, being, in a highly credible and well-wrought dialogue that puts both in jeopardy and commands our empathy while posing questions we want to have answered. It makes for riveting, provocative and thought-provoking entertainment. 

Vere-Hampson Tindale nails the self-loathing tough guy, Danny (29), allowing his vulnerability to slowly surface in a powerful performance that is only marred by some chewing up and swallowing of his words. My question throughout is “but why is he like this?” and I hear no answer yet on consulting my review of a 1999 production, I discover “Danny hates his dad because he died too early.” My companion and I both miss that crucial detail.

The persistently chatty yet lost and lonely Roberta (31) is also made very real by Janelle Pollock. The space between them crackles with polarised energy. And both ring the extraordinary and extreme changes in their moods, desires, dreams and reality checks at an undeniable level of truth.

It’s up to us to decide what Danny’s ‘deep blue sea’ is. Roberta, perhaps? Will it /she drown him or take him to a new horizon, well beyond age 30 when he has long believed he will blow his brains out to end it all?  

What he, she, they and we are prepared to believe in, and the way all that keeps changing, is what drives their stories. Is redemption possible, given what they have separately done? Could love conquer all? What the hell is love anyway? The play doesn’t avoid powerful reality checks any more than it avoids the seductive allure of romance. We are all tossed about between the peaks and toughs of pessimism and optimism, reality and fantasy.

Director Chaz Harris has a tight hand on the helm of this ‘ship of fate’, assuring good pace and momentum without sacrificing emotional truth. I am surprised designer Theo Wijnasma’s otherwise authentic settings require such a cumbersome reset between scenes, given the tightness of Brady Kuech’s lighting and the minimal space required by the action.

At just one hour, Danny and the Deep Blue Sea takes us on a helluva ride. It takes a while to get our ‘land legs’ back and reconnect with our own real worlds.

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer