[In the following favorable review of the 1993 production of Separate Tables, Spencer reflects on the critical neglect of Rattigan's work.]

I suspect 1993 will be remembered as the year Terence Rattigan finally came in from the cold. In the Forties and early Fifties he was the most successful of West End playwrights, but with the arrival of the angry young men his stock fell disastrously. He was seen as a dishonest, even cowardly writer, pandering to the complacent morality of “Aunt Edna”, whom Rattigan described as “the universal and immortal middle-class theatre-goer”. But with the superb revival of The Deep Blue Sea earlier this year and now Peter Hall's excellent production of Separate Tables at the Albery, his neglect seems baffling and his detractors foolish. There is a spirit of charity and human understanding in both these works that is deeply moving. Separate Tables (1954) really consists of two one-act plays. The supporting cast remains constant, as does the setting, the shabbily genteel Beauregard Private Hotel near Bournemouth. But the two leading actors, in this production Peter Bowles and Patricia Hodge, each play two different characters, offering a chance for virtuosity of which they both take full advantage. But there is nothing remotely showy about these pieces. Rattigan, for all his glossy public success, is a chronicler of the lonely, the loveless and the dispossessed, of characters courageously trying to put a brave face on lives of quiet desperation. It has to be said that the first piece, Table by the Window, isn't a complete success. I never quite believed in the painful love between a disgraced junior Labour minister and his ageing fashion model of an ex-wife who has tracked him down to the South Coast hotel. But Peter Bowles powerfully captures masochistic passion and drink-slurred self-contempt, while Miss Hodge's progress from icy beauty to racking sobs as she contemplates a lonely old age sends shivers down the spine. In Table Number Seven it is Miss Hodge who is unrecognisable, all stooped shoulders, ugly glasses and mouse-like demeanour. I never thought this actress could look dowdy but she certainly does here in a most touching performance as a repressed spinster with a terror of sex. Her mother (surely Rattigan's revenge on Aunt Edna) is a vicious old trout who reacts with vindictive pleasure when it's discovered that their fellow guest, “Major” Pollock, has lied about his rank and been convicted of making “insulting” advances to women in the local cinema. This would have been an even more interesting play had Rattigan been able to stick to his original idea of making the major's offence a homosexual one, but Peter Bowles is again in superb form. The old soldier's jaunty blazered bogusness is right up Bowles's street, of course, but his pain and panic when he's found out, and his clear-eyed acknowledgment of his own cowardice to the sympathetic hotel manageress cut to the quick. Mrs Railton-Bell, played with splendidly malevolent relish by the marvellous Rosemary Leach, is robbed of victory when the other residents and even her own daughter rally round the “major”. I suppose you could accuse this ending of being sentimental, but I found it both moving and generously funny, a gleeful routing of oppressive morality and meanness of spirit. Peter Hall's production, evocatively designed by Carl Toms, gets to the heart of these decent and affecting plays, and there is a wealth of strong supporting performances. Miriam Karlin, Faith Flint and Rachel Gurney all offer excellent value, but it is Charlotte Cornwell as the manageress who movingly delivers the plucky, heart-breaking moral of these plays: “It's surprising how cheerful one can be when one gives up hope.” Such fortitude is not to be despised. Rattigan is the poet of the stiff upper lip.