In this new adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s classic play Separate Tables, director Philip Franks is not only in charge of the action onstage, but also has to run a backstage kitchen too.

“There are 12 full dinners served during the performance,” he says. “That comes to 24 on matinee days.

“Rattigan was very specific about the food, what people ate, what was off the menu – those who tucked into their food and those who just push it around the plate.”

It’s just one of the minute details he believes is essential in making the play work.

“We are going for as a meticulously detailed production as we can,” he says. “Unless you get the details right and the period right, you can end up on the wrong track.”

Set in 1954 and 1956, Separate Tables is essentially two one-act plays, both set in a hotel dining room.

The first deals with a troubled but passionate relationship, while the other sees a repressed spinster form a touching friendship with a retired Army officer.

The two couples in the centre of each play are both being played by Olivier-nominated Iain Glen and Gina McKee, who made her name in the seminal BBC drama Our Friends In The North.

“It is only in the film that the roles are played by different people,” says Franks. “Margaret Leighton and Eric Portman did the double first of all, both in the West End and in America.

“Rattigan wrote the play with that in mind.

“It gives two great actors a chance to show their versatility – in the first play they are in a passionate hetrosexual relationship, where they can’t live with or without each other. In the second, we have two people whose relationship with sex is very much hidden.”

Surrounding the pair is a cast of characters who are all permanent residents at the hotel, headed up by Stephanie Cole’s fearsome Mrs Railton-Bell.

“Separate Tables has much to say about loneliness and being an outsider in a hostile community,” says Franks.

“There is an epic quality to it – the hotel is an image of the world, as so many hotels in plays are.”

The play continues Franks’ love affair with Rattigan – someone he describes as one of the great playwrights of the 20th century.

“He fell out of favour for a long time in the 1960s and 1970s when the tide of British drama swept him away,” says Franks.

“He was thought of as repressed, buttoned-up and middle class.

“Now people have realised how great his plays are. There are wonderful parts for actors and they cover important subject matter. He admired Ibsen and Chekhov, and those similarities in his plays are being recognised now.”

The large stage at the Chichester Festival Theatre might seem a strange choice for such an intimate play, but Franks believes it will work.

“When we did Nicholas Nickleby at the Chichester Festival Theatre there were big epic moments, but also scenes which were just two people sat on the ground talking,” he says. “If the acting is right, it will work.

“It would have been easier to do it in the Minerva Theatre, but Chichester has shown it has a hunger for Terence Rattigan, so it is good to have the opportunity to reach 800 or 900 people a night rather than 200.”

*7.30pm, 2pm matinees available, tickets from £11, call 01243 781312