The Browning Version is widely considered one of Terence Rattigan's masterpieces, but as a one-act play it seems to cause a lot of trouble for producers trying to pair it with something else as a double bill (Rattigan's own original choice of companion piece,
Harlequinade, seems to be generally ruled out for being both too inferior and too big a shift in mood to work.) James Dacre's touring production
Summer 1954 has mixed and matched it with a short from another of the playwright's double bills,
Separate Tables, and so the new pairing opens at a Bournemouth hotel where most of the rooms are taken by semi-permanent residents. In
Table Number Seven Siân Phillips plays the imperious Mrs Railton-Bell, who learns from the local paper that another resident, Major Pollock (Nathaniel Parker) isn't quite who he says he is.
