Separate Tables

The critic Kenneth Tynan wrote that both plays, in Rattigan’s Separate Tables, are about people who are driven by loneliness into a state of desperation.

Set in a run-down, South Coast hotel filled with genteel sadness, Separate Tables consists of two interlinked playlets. In the first, Table by the Window, a lonely divorcee tracks down her former husband, a leftwing journalist and failed politican, in order to resume a kind of half-life with him.

The play uncannily anticipates Look Back in Anger with its fusion of sex and class war and its view of marriage as a ghastly, violent battlefield.
In Table Number Seven, the second act, we witness the public exposure of a bogus Major accused of sexual assault in the local cinema. He is bravely supported by the repressed lonely spinster who manages the hotel and who yearns for romance. The Major’s offence was against young women but recently discovered papers of Rattigan, revealed that his original intention was for the assaults to be homosexual – the sexual mores of the time meaning that Rattigan altered or self-censored his work.

This wonderful revival, directed by John Berry and presented in Rattigan’s favourite town, is to be performed in the ideal, genteel setting of the Marlborough Theatre – a mere stone’s throw from Rattigan’s former home on Marine Parade.