Danny and the Deep Blue Sea announced playwright John Patrick Shanley in 1983, when an Off-Broadway production earned a near-unknown John Turturro an Obie Award. Shanley would go on to write Moonstruck – which shares something of this play’s combustible romanticism – and Doubt: A Parable, soon to be revived by Sydney Theatre Company.

It hasn’t been staged in Sydney for at least a couple of decades. Like Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love, it’s something of a period piece, harking back to a time when rawness and grit were prized commodities. For today’s intimacy co-ordinators, it’s a parade of red flags.

JK Kazzi and Jacqui Purvis in Danny and the Deep Blue Sea. Photo © Tony Davison

A bar somewhere in the Bronx. A woman nurses the dregs of a beer. A young man storms in and drops into the next seat, knuckles bleeding, rage crackling off him like static. For a couple of minutes they barely acknowledge each other.

She is Roberta, 31, divorced, between jobs, living with her family, numbed by disappointment and haunted by something shameful.

He is Danny, 29 and convinced he won’t see 30. His hair-trigger temper has already earned him the nickname ‘The Beast’ among his trucking-company colleagues. 

Each is deeply damaged, though in different ways. Roberta is haunted by a sexual encounter in her teens that shattered her family and her own capacity to trust. Danny, raised in violence and always on the verge of jumping out of his skin, has no language for his emotions beyond his fists.

Can either lower their guard long enough to imagine something other than a punch in the face?

JK Kazzi and Jacqui Purvis in Danny and the Deep Blue Sea. Photo © Tony Davison

Director Nigel Turner-Carroll leans into the hard-boiled quality of the script with a stripped-back staging: two bar tables and chairs, later replaced by a mattress on the floor.

JK Kazzi (Bell Shakespeare’s recent Henry 5) and Jacqui Purvis are well matched in terms of combustibility and intensity. That said, the first act is hard to engage with at times. Its blending of physical and verbal violence needs careful calibration and too often, the stage action turns into a savage blur. When you need to see eyes and faces, you can’t.

But as Danny and Roberta find common ground and the yelling and shoving subsides, both characters seem to swell and open up to our sympathy. And even if we’re not entirely convinced by Danny’s strategy to ease Roberta’s festering guilt, we find ourselves hoping that this one-night stand connection might just hold.

Danny and the Deep Blue Sea plays at the Old Fitzroy Theatre, Woolloomooloo until 7 February.