Overview

"Few dramatists of this century have written with more understanding of the human heart than Terence Rattigan" (Guardian) This selection from the best of Rattigan's work from the '50s onwards includes two of his most popular plays, The Deep Blue Sea which movingly depicts the closing stages of a hopeless, adulterous, socially inequitable love affair between an RAF war hero and a judge's wife; Separate Tables, printed in its original version for the first time, comprises two one-act plays both set in a private hotel in Bournemouth but with a different pair of principal characters - in one a disgraced politician and his estranged wife, in the other, a bogus major and young woman dominated by her mother "This gay version hardly departs from the original, yet converts a conventional West End drama into a forceful attack upon 1950s witch-hunts and stigmatising of homosexuals...how luminously Rattigan evokes the sexually intolerant and phobic attitudes of fifties middle England" (Evening Standard); the volume closes with In Praise of Love, in which a woman and her husband persist in gallantly deceiving one another each pretending to be unaware that she is fatally ill.