REVIEW: Separate Tables, Chichester Festival Theatre, until October 3.

Festival 2009 at the CFT ends on a gloriously high note with director Philip Franks' superlative double dose of Terence Rattigan at his very best.

Franks orchestrates a first-class cast to perfection to deliver a timely reminder of Rattigan's brilliance with his centenary year looming.

We are back in the 1950s in a world long since gone, a world in which loners, misfits and those with precarious finances lived out their days as permanent guests in genteel south-coast hotels.

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But the passions which stir them and the anxieties which unite them are still instantly recognisable today, as Franks shows with the two pieces which make up Separate Tables.

Set in the same hotel 18 months apart and with some of the same characters carried across, the two Acts are markedly different in tone, the second much more comic than the darker opener.

One is the twisted tale of a self-destructive couple incapable of living apart; the second, the tale of a fraudster whose lapses threaten to leave him completely ostracised.

But common to both is that we are in a world of lonely, damaged creatures '“ a world evoked with huge humanity by Rattigan, particularly in the second piece where his evident belief in the sheer decency of human nature will send you home with a warm glow of pleasure.

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Franks' sureness of touch when it comes to the pathos is matched only by his sureness of touch when it comes to the comedy, and designer Stephen Brimson Lewis gives him the perfect set on which to explore both to the limit.

The entire cast responds with admirable skill and confidence.

Iain Glen is impressive as the shambolic, failed politician, in the grip of the most twisted of relationships in the first Act; but he comes into his own as the major whose indiscretions and lies '“ both born of his sad isolation '“ threaten him with expulsion.

Gina McKee conjures the most remarkable transformation; glamorous, unstable and passionate in the first Act, a timid mouse of an overgrown child in the second '“ an undernourished, brow-beaten creature about to find her heart. There is huge skill in McKee's delivery of both.

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Providing continuity is Deborah Findlay as the landlady Miss Cooper, discreet, protective towards her guests and wise '“ all the result of a past which Findlay beautifully hints at.

But stealing the show, particularly in the second Act, is Stephanie Cole as the ghastly, bigoted Mrs Railton-Bell, a formidable grande dame convinced that she's the moral barometer for everyone around her.

The scene in which Mrs R-B is the self-appointed chairman of the public inquiry into the major's possible eviction is priceless. You start to long for her come-uppance; and the comedy is brilliantly done.

Put it all together, and it's the highlight of the main-house summer season '“ a faultless production which engages from the very first moment.

Phil Hewitt