Set in a run-down residential hotel in Bournemouth, Separate Tables consists of two linked one-act plays. In the first a lonely divorcee tracks down her former husband in order to resume a kind of half-life with him. In the other a repressed young spinster offers brave moral support to a fake major accused of importuning women in a local cinema.

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 includes an authoritative introduction, biographical sketch and chronology.

'Few dramatists of this century have written with more understanding of the human heart than Terence Rattigan' - Michael Billington