Separate Tables

Two linked one-act plays set in a run-down residential hotel in Bournemouth. In the first of the plays, Table by the Window, a lonely divorcee tracks down her former husband in order to resume a kind of half-life with him. In the other, Table Number Seven, a repressed young spinster offers brave moral support to a fake major accused of importuning women in a local cinema. Terence Rattigan's play Separate Tables was first produced at the St. James's Theatre, London, in September 1954. In an alternative version, only recently discovered among Rattigan's papers, the major's offence was revealed to be homosexual; these 'alternative' scenes are published here for the first time. This edition, edited and introduced by Dan Rebellato, includes a biographical sketch and chronology. 'Few dramatists of this century have written with more understanding of the human heart than Terence Rattigan' Michael Billington