THEATRE
Separate Tables. By Terence Rattigan. (St. James's.)
No more Ruritania for Rattigan. With this pair of plays we are in familiar surroundings. The scene is set in a private hotel in Bourne- mouth and each play concerns some human problems solved by the efficient action of Miss Cooper, the hotel manageress. Iri the first half of the evening's entertainment it is a down-and-out politician who is the corpus delicti, and the question facing him is whether to go back to his former wife, who takes too much veronal, and consequently needs him, or whether to remain quietly sozzling down in Bournemouth.. Needless to say, Miss Cooper, though in love with him herself, does the big thing and pushes him back into the arms of his dope fiend. By some odd theatrical convention this appears a happy ending.
In the second play, Major Pollock (who is actually a Lieutenant in the RASC—a very crushing thing to be apparently) is found to have committed what are called 'offences' in a cinema—a discovery which is the signal for some fine blasts of moral indignation on the part of other inmates of the hotel. The situation is complicated by the fact that the wretched daughter of an appalling mother staying in the hotel, has a crush on him, and the disillusionment com- bined with an alpha-plus mother complex, threatens to push her over the edge of a never too firm sanity. Once again, it is Miss Cooper who intervenes and, by persuading Major Pollock to stay on at the hotel and face the 'gossip, resolves the situation. The play ends with daughter defying mother for the first time in her life and with the other guests in the hotel deciding that indignation is the better part of ethics and that they may now safely welcome Pollock back into decent society. That makes two of them— happy endings, I mean.
So there you have it: good middle-brow domestic drama so concentrated, and so forcefully presented by Mr. Rattigan's admirable stagecraft, that it comes over with a punch one had learned to associate with the cinema. The illusion is complete: we are in the 13cauregard Private Hotel in Bourne- mouth and, in the same way, the acting of Eric Portman as the drunken politician, and the satyr, manages to gloss over the improba- bilities in the plot (what would a Socialist ex- minister be doi ng in Bournemouth?). Margaret Leighton backs him up splendidly as a dope fiend and then repressed daughter, and Beryl Measor brings to the part of Miss Cooper just the right air of calm efficiency and hidden depths. The other hotel guests are done with the utmost skill, Phyllis Neilson- Terry in particular giving a performance of surpassing horror as the selfish rich woman living on her daughter's nerves. Mr.
Rattigan, in fact, has been well served by his cast, but then he has given them parts to get their teeth into. Even if the dialogue does sometimes resemble a parody on stage dialogue, this intensified melodrama is bound to hold any audience riveted.
ANTHONY HARTLEY
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