"We've spent a lot of time playing chess in rehearsals," says director Philip Wilson.

"The male characters don't really talk, so playing chess is a way for them to communicate. And the play in general is so much about rituals and patterns of behaviour and how, in some ways, we get locked into ways of moving."

Hailed as a compact, heartbreaking masterpiece, In Praise Of Love is the last play proper by Terence Rattigan, whose better known works include The Winslow Boy and The Deep Blue Sea.

Initially praised for his craftsmanship and grasp of the British character, Rattigan's critical reputation took a downturn after 1956, when John Osborne's Look Back In Anger announced a new kind of emotional explicitness. And there have been few major productions of In Praise Of Love since it was first staged in 1973.

But Chichester Festival is eager to see Rattigan re-established as a profoundly insightful playwright and, while last year's production of King Lear proved the Minerva's thrust stage was ideal for epics, this year it should enable a fresh take on this traditional proscenium piece.

"It's a tremendously intriguing play," says Wilson, here making his Chichester Festival debut. "It's about what it is to be English and what happens when people talk to each other but don't really connect. Being explicit isn't really the point for Rattigan."

Said to be based on the true-life relationship between Rex Harrison and his wife Kay Kendall, and her early death from cancer, In Praise Of Love centres around the marriage of Sebastian (Michael Thomas) and Lydia Cruttwell (Suzanne Burden), whose 28-year marriage has been conducted in a state of permanent emotional restraint.

Now Lydia has learnt she is terminally ill, but she prefers to confide in family friend Mark (Nathan Osgood), on a visit from America, than to burden her husband and son Joey (Philip Cumbus) with the news. In the space of two evenings a rush of revelations puts all their loves to the test.

"There are layers and layers of buried emotions," explains Wilson.

"A lot of it seems to take place in rather light small-talk and it's only later you realise that there's a lot more going on. There's a huge rug-pull before the end."

Whatever Rattigan's reputation, In Praise Of Love, says Wilson, is no genteel comedy. The only one of his plays to have been set in the time of writing, it was finished just four years before Rattigan's death from bone cancer in 1976.

"He wasn't well when he wrote it and in some ways it feels like a summation, a real gathering together of thoughts," says Wilson. "It's filled with little echoes of his own life and even hints and fragments of earlier plays. There's a real sense of personal investment.

We've all found it startlingly contemporary because it's about how human beings are with each other. And I don't think that dates."

Tickets cost £16 and £21, call 01273 781312.