John Patrick Shanley’s Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, written in 1983, is a play about most of the ingredients that make us humans human: the need to be heard, understood, loved and accepted, and the fear of not being any of these things. It is a play that is perpetual in the emotional resonance it evokes, and timeless in the modern-day relevance of its various subject matters: violence, anti-social behaviour, psychiatric disorders and suicide, to name just a few.
When the lives of Danny (Edwin Mullane) and Roberta (Clodagh Downing) accidentally converge in a grubby little watering hole in the Bronx, the scene is set for some highly compelling counterpoint between two seriously damaged souls: he thinks he’s just killed a man, and she’s bound by the shackles of a past sexual encounter that she instigated with her father.
Perched casually on a barstool in an appropriately bare setting is Roberta, nursing the dregs of a glass of beer and crushing fistfuls of pretzels into a bowl. As she stares, vacant and deadpan, into the space above our heads, Danny enters with a bloodied face and bruised knuckles, snarling and seething with dangerously irrepressible aggression and breathless in the aftermath of some unimaginably violent event. She hardly flinches, only to tell him to “fuck off” when he asks her for a pretzel. It quickly becomes clear that both characters are enveloped in a skin that has been thickened by life’s dealings of an acutely unkind hand of cards, and the recognition of this in each other is precisely what pulls them so intensely together in one erratic night.
Hours before they decide to marry each other, Roberta tells Danny how she thinks she would quite enjoy being in jail – “change of scenery,” she contemplates, “it would keep me from going off my nut.” And before that, Danny has told her about his plans to commit suicide: “As soon as I turn twenty-eight,” he tells her, “I’m gonna put a gun in my mouth and blow my fucking head off.” Roberta advises him instinctively, and with the coolness of a silently innate understanding, to do it in the bathroom because it’s easier to clean up.
With similarly dynamic rejoinders between the two, and sharp contrasts between the verbally explosive paroxysms, physical outbursts of violence, and well-timed conversational lulls and moments of lukewarm amiability, I find myself fully engaged in one of the most atmospheric of duologues, where nothing is for sure, everyone’s on guard, and there is an unmistakable sense of disaster in the air. Before we reach the halfway point in this 70 minute play, we have been transported to the deepest murkiest quarters of the human psyche after it has been tarnished by emotional pain, self-loathing, violence, hatred and guilt. With Shanley’s ability to find beauty in the beast, strong unwavering acting by both performers and finely tuned direction by Peter Reid, we find ourselves helplessly loving these two monsters, and longing for their unlikely love to prevail against all the odds.
Reid’s staging is well judged in its bareness, with every item in both the bar and bedroom scene perfectly befitting to the plot: a refreshingly simple setting in which to absorb a complex narrative. Thankfully, the accents remained geographically pinned for the most part. While Downing’s body language seemed a little forced, with lots of hair rearranging and arms that were distractingly adrift at times, Mullane firmly maintained his physical and facial skittishness by keeping his teeth on show and his shoulders close to his ears. Downing delivered her lines with a delightfully chromatic vocal range, from a deep down baritone-like resonance to a soaring gush of song-like phrases in the pacier moments of the play. She was perhaps at her best as Roberta in the bedroom scene, and prevented any sense of tediousness from creeping into her longer monologue about a drug-induced hallucination. The taming of “the beast,” the nickname given to Danny by his trucker driver colleagues, is a gradual, and unpredictable process before us, as it should be, and Mullane’s stage presence (from his physical disquiet to his grease-ball hair style) is completely apt for the role.
The finale of the play edges towards some form of self-transformation in both characters with Danny offering Roberta forgiveness for what she has done (culminating oddly in him throwing her over his knees and slapping her backside a number of times). The open-endedness of the play leaves you wondering whether Danny’s offering was merely an act of desperation to get Roberta past something he deemed slightly trivial, or whether he was looking for mutual forgiveness from her. Either way, both characters undergo a kind of exorcism as a result of meeting each other, but whether or not it is for better or worse is never fully revealed.
The humour in Shanley’s script was brilliantly underscored by Reid’s insightful direction and served some much needed comic relief along an otherwise dismal journey of dashed hopes and damaged spirits. Although the light of her “some kinda moon” eventually goes out (it being on a timer to save electricity), the play leaves you with a fleck of hope: “Let’s be happy,” Roberta suggests, “If you love me, I’ll love you too.”
Jennifer Lee