Page 191 - YB1959_Classical

I saw what went into it." Separate Tables is actually two one-act plays dealing with the same people. The scene is set "Other people aren't as sensible as we are, in a little boarding house in a glum watering they go and get married ... " place on the Channel coast of England. The manageress, Miss Cooper, is a selfless and sensi- ble young woman who has developed a per- sonal complication with one of her boarders, "Good-by. God bless you." John Malcolm, a political has-been. Then sud- denly Malcolm's ex-wife,beautiful, fear-ridden, and ill, comes hunting him. The manageress chooses a life of independency, and Malcolm realizes that life without his ex-wife is not really "living." The second play deals with the Major, a retired military man who never lets up about the good old days in North Africa. One day he is charged with molesting a woman in a local cinema. The newspaper reports that he was not a major at all, but only a lieutenant, who had spent the war in a supply depot. This causes further complications, because the resi- dent gossip-monger soon demands that the Major be thrown out of the hotel, even though -or perhaps because-she knows her shy, hys- terical daughter, Sibyl, is in love with the old fraud. Through the mediation of Miss Cooper, this problem, too, is resolved, and Sibyl and the Major find new courage to face life. The universal truth of the play echoed in Miss Cooper's speech of consolation to Sibyl who wishes with all her heart that she were just "normal." "You see ... the word normal, applied to any human being, is utterly mean- ingless. In a sort of a way it's an insult to our Maker, don't you think, to suppose that He could possibly work to any set pattern?" 187