This handsome double-bill of Terence Rattigan’s one-act plays brings together The Browning Version, often seen as one of his finest, with the lesser revived Table Number Seven. The latter proves the more moving. Immaculately paced by director James Dacre, it features a pretender, Pollock (Nathaniel Parker, quietly tragic), parading as an upper-class army man at a well-heeled Bournemouth hotel until he is exposed for “importuning”.
Set in the midst of Britain’s homosexual witch-hunts of the 1950s, and premiering a year after John Gielgud was arrested for cottaging, Rattigan (himself gay) drafted the major to be propositioning men but later changed it to his sexual harassment of women. This production gathers emotional momentum by returning to his original idea, vividly capturing the loneliness of a gay man in a time when homosexuality was seen as a “public menace”.
