Separate Tables: Every Man an Island

Abstract

Separate Tables consists of two one-act plays joined together by the same setting, a residential hotel, and by the reappearance of several characters from one play to the next. Through that fragile connection Rattigan not only makes a universal statement on the loneliness and desperation of the human condition, but also shows the small, temporary victories over despair and fear that human beings can have if they try to connect with one another. In the first play, Rattigan shows a couple with widely disparate sexual needs and incompatibility in just about every way possible who yet are able to overcome their doubts to try again, knowing ruefully the odds are against them. In the second play, a retired military man who has been arrested for accosting women in a movie theater and is therefore asked to leave the hotel by some of the other residents, decides finally to stay in residence at the hotel because a neurotic and high-strung woman under the thumb of her mother stirringly defies her mother and thereby signals to the Major that he should not leave. Rattigan’s metaphor for human society is the hotel (a transient’s temporary residence) and its dining room with separate tables, indicating the residents of a solar system without a sun, fixed in their routines and never progressing except toward old age and death.