Separate Tables, Royal Exchange Theatre. Manchester <!-- none onestar twostar threestar fourstar fivestar -->

There's a sense of both despair and hope in Terence Rattigan's double bill, Separate Tables, an acute and often extremely funny perception of humanity and its foibles. The lives of a handful of lonely guests, marooned in a pseudo-genteel seaside hotel in Bournemouth, become intertwined as the plays reveal secrets, lies and love.

In the first play, Table by the Window, the arrival of a glamorous model in search of her alcoholic ex-husband sends ripples through the routine of the ladies who lounge and lunch and not much else. It creates turbulence in the heart of the stout-hearted hotel proprietress (a stalwart Alexandra Mathie), privately involved with the man irrevocably diminished by his wreck of a marriage. She recognises her newest guest as his former wife from his description of her: "carved in ice". And Clare Holman, superficial composure and distraught instability in equal measure, looks and acts the part perfectly. She brings a haughty desperation to her character, willing deep emotional wounds to be opened, arousing the same old feelings of violent frustration in the lover she once so enthralled.

As their abusive relationship threatens to take up where it left off, it seems as though neither party has learnt from its bruising experience - old regrets, bitter accusations and that old chestnut, class distinction, surfacing uncomfortably. Each hangs on - she grimly, he tentatively - to the slender threads that keep them afloat from the abyss of loneliness.

Sarah Frankcom's intelligent, well-cast production gives the drama a noirish edge, while allowing the characters room to breathe, revealing Rattigan's keen observations and gift for skilful dialogue. Surrounding the central trio is a gallery of sharply etched figures whose frayed lives and dimmed personalities come into clearer focus in the second of these one-act plays, where the tables eventually turn.

Table Number Seven is presented at the Royal Exchange in the revised version Rattigan prepared for the American stage (where it wasn't used in the end since the actor Eric Portman preferred not to go down the homosexual avenue in 1954).

A kindly but fraudulent buffer sees his life ripped to shreds when reports of his misdemeanours (approaching young men here as opposed to trying it on with young women in the equivalent, shorter passage in the original play) become public knowledge among the hotel residents.

The revelation of his fabricated public school education and military career adds to the consternation. It's the perfect opportunity for the dragon-like Mrs Railton-Bell, all too plausibly portrayed by Janet Henfrey, to display her uprightness while creating both rifts and some interesting self-revelations among the other guests.

Muddled middle-Englandism and dubious reasoning lead to the proposed eviction of the alleged Major. Behind a stiff upper lip, Nigel Cooke (also the jaded lover of Table by the Window) displays the quiet agony of a man deprived of the charade he has created in order to exist. Clare Holman switches superbly to the role of Railton-Bell's repressed daughter, who gradually realises that she gained far more from the Major's company than she or her ghastly mother could have guessed.

Eighteen months on, both hotel and resort are more in vogue than when we last visited in dreary off-season but between 1953 and 1954, however, as Ti Green's designs illustrate, times have moved on. Television has superseded radio, food rationing has ended, and fashions have lightened up. But not moral indignation, as Rattigan's rich drama so satisfyingly explores.

To 13 May (0161-833 9833)