OFTEN it takes death to stir a reappraisal, as with Harold Pinter, but will the centenary of Terence Rattigan’s birth lead to his rebirth?

Rattigan was swept away on the tide of the Angry Young Men, Pinter among them, and a check of The Press library files reveals his last play at the Playhouse was a Bath Theatre Royal tour of The Browning Version as long ago as 2000.

The faded, brown-edged programme cover for Sarah Esdaile’s revival of The Deep Blue Sea apes the play’s 1952 setting, and the clipped accents and mannered movements reinforce the sense of a post-war period piece being cryogenically re-awoken.

This does not make a rousing case for raising Rattigan from dormancy, and so Esdaile’s production is caught between the devil and the….

While it feels the need to be true to its period formality and elaborate language, it also relies on a star name, Maxine Peake, to arouse interest, and then designer Ruari Murchison gives it an unnecessarily demonstrative fashion makeover more in keeping with Gok Wan, to counter the old-fashioned aroma.

Granted, the Quarry stage is a big space to fill, and fill it Murchison does with a picture-frame design that works against the domestic drama’s suppression and claustrophobia after vicar’s daughter Hester (Peake) jettisons respectability with safe, dull High Court judge husband William (John Ramm) for a last dash of danger with handsome, tippling, emotionally featherweight ex-fighter pilot Freddie Page (Lex Shrapnel).

The use of grey gauze to facilitate seeing movement on the stairs beyond the drab living room better evokes her reduced bedsit circumstances and creates a feeling of murkiness too.

Hester is awoken from a failed suicide attempt, and Peake’s performance has the fragility and self-loathing of an unfulfilled woman in despair, but not physical grace or emotional impact. Nor is there chemistry with Shrapnel’s Freddie, although her limp arms speak volumes when William embraces her in the hope of reconciliation.

Where Ramm and Peake favour subtlety in treacherous waters, Sam Cox’s struck-off doctor, the gravely Gothic Mr Miller, is an unexpectedly comic turn, strangely appealing yet at odds with the frigidity and delicacy elsewhere.

In the year of re-acquaintance with Rattigan, the cobwebs are still being shaken off in this less than convincing opening statement.

Box office: 0113 213 7700.