A few weeks ago I was in Chichester, reviewing a fine revival of Terence Rattigan’s Separate Tables and suddenly experienced a great ache of nostalgia for the period immediately before my birth.
A few weeks ago I was in Chichester, reviewing a fine revival of Terence Rattigan’s Separate Tables and suddenly experienced a great ache of nostalgia for the period immediately before my birth. Rattigan’s play, first staged in 1954, portrays a post-second-world-war England in which emotions are essentially private, polite small talk largely prevails, and upper lips are worn stiff — in public at least.
Of course, the dramatist was in many ways critical of this. Yet though Separate Tables undoubtedly depicts a world where small-mindedness and meanness of spirit can flourish, its final scenes present a moving triumph for English decency, compassion, courage and restraint.
In the interval I confessed to my nostalgia for the buttoned-up times Rattigan depicts to a colleague and he told me I was bonkers.
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