A GENTEEL Bournemouth hotel becomes a melting pot of repressed feelings, unspoken desire, pits of despair and wells of loneliness, in Terence Rattigan's Separate Tables, which is being performed at Salisbury Playhouse until November 8.
Tongues are wagging at the Beauregard Hotel where the desperate, the disparate and the downright dangerous are keeping up appearances at separate tables.
The play is directed by Gareth Machin, who has brought this 1954 cracker to life, with two stories, Table By the Window and Table Number Seven.
Kirsty Besterman, whose television appearances include Father Brown, Silent Witness and Foyles War, is Mrs Shankland, the fading beauty who has come back to haunt her husband John Malcolm, the former rising Labour politician who fell from grace after assaulting his once wife.
Mr Malcolm is brilliantly played by Robert Perkins whose film appearances include Close Encounter, the Upside of Anger and Born Kicking.
It becomes only too clear that this couple cannot live with or without each other.
Mr Perkins, the scruffy and borderline alcoholic journalist in the first play transforms into the bombastic and shifty Major Pollock, who is found guilty of importuning men on the esplanade.
The heinous Mrs Railton-Bell, whose nose for gossip coupled with a terrier-style determination makes her a force to be reckoned with.
Star of the West End Jane How, who is probably best known for playing Dirty Den's mistress in EastEnders, plays the ghastly Railton-Bell, who leads a witch hunt to have Pollock removed. It fails. He stays.
Kirsty is also transformed in the second play as the dowdy spinster daughter of Mrs Railton-Bell.
Mr Fowler represses his own sexual shame and is played beautifully by Graham Seed, who is best known for playing Nigel Pargetter in Radio 4’s The Archers.
The hidden whispers among the hotel guests reveal Rattigan's skill to tackle the sex and class war, marriage, a changing society and his own fear and insecurity of his own homosexuality, love and lust in a bitter-sweet tale that ended all too soon on stage.
I was hooked. This masterpiece deserves a standing ovation.
Karen Bate
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