The Players will be serving up an evening of Rattigan’s finest award-winning work in two plays set in the same location.

In the Beauregard Private Hotel, Bournemouth lives a group of aging permanent residents whose lives are enlivened occasionally by the arrival of the ‘itinerants’, those travellers who pop in and out on their way to Elsewhere.

In two distinct but related plays, Rattigan invites the audience to join the residents and their ‘guests’, and watch their lives evolve and change. The first, Table by the Window, presents the climactic meeting of John Malcolm, a journalist and disgraced politician, with his ex-wife, Anne Shankland.

The second, Table Number Seven, explores the social responses to scandal, as Major Pollock, an upstanding ‘regular’ of the hotel, has his true character revealed in melodramatic circumstances.

NKP director Mike Galikowski said: “Intelligent and literate, Separate Tables is old fashioned considering the times it was written in. But the characters absorb you in their problems and you leave it with the fervent wish that they all find some healing together or apart.”

Performances, which began last night, will take place at The Edward Marsh Centre, Legion Drive, Kinver, DY7 6ER at 7.30pm until Saturday.

Tickets are available at £8 or £6 (concessionary) from the ticket hotline on 01562 746602 .