This selection from the best of Terence 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. 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. Before Dawn – An hilarious retelling of the play and opera Tosca, with Scarpia as a swaggering villain who proves to be impotent, Tosca as a proud beauty and a Captain who gets confused as to whether Scarpia means that Tosca’s lover should really be executed … or only appear to be. Tosca’s attempt to stab Scarpia is foiled by his knife-proof vest.

Published by Methuen

304 pages

Condition; EXCELLENT – unmarked