BOURNEMOUTH doesn’t have an official playwright. But if it did, surely Sir Terrence Rattigan would have been it.

Like the town, Rattigan was elegant and refined on the outside, the perfect English gentleman. But underneath the genteel exterior there was something else going on; he was gay, at a time when it was considered a serious offence to even chat up another man.

Perhaps that’s why he set two of his most memorable works in the town, capturing, with admirable finesse, the essence of Bournemouth’s darker side, of what might be going on behind the net curtains and away from the sunny prom.

His first Bournemouth play was Separate Tables, penned in 1954, about two separate incidents which take place in the fictional Beauregard Hotel. In one story the debonair major who lives at the hotel causes a stir when it is revealed he has been caught propositioning women.

For many years this play was performed – and David Niven even played the major on film – but many felt that something was not quite right and they were correct. In 1998 a missing page of the play’s text was discovered, and it revealed that far from molesting women, the major had been importuning young men.

Colin Ellwood, the first director to put the new version on stage at the King’s Head Theatre in Islington, said: “There’s always been a sense with Separate Tables that things don’t quite add up. What the characters say and their reaction to the news of the major’s arrest is rather bizarre if all he’s been doing is propositioning women in the cinema.”

He says that when the lost page is inserted: “The other characters and their reactions to him become much more understandable.”

Why did Rattigan do it? Bizarrely, it was partly because his mother accompanied him to premieres and he was troubled by her possible reaction to the story. But he also believed the Lord Chamberlain, then the chief censor of plays, would be against it.

Shortly after the first performance of Separate Tables, John Osbourne burst onto the scene with Look Back In Anger and attention swung towards the bleak, kitchen-sink drams of the Angry Young Men. Rattigan’s craftsmanship was less appreciated and it hurt. By the time he died he was described as “embittered” and felt shunned by the theatrical establishment.

If he had been able to use his original version of Separate Tables, says Colin Ellwood, “this subject would have been dangerous and controversial and he would have been seen in a completely different light”.

Rattigan’s experience with Separate Tables did not put him off Bournemouth, however. In 1975 he wrote Cause Celebre, based upon the events at the Villa Madeira on the East Cliff 40 years earlier. Eighteen-year-old servant George Stonor whacked his employer, Francis Rattenbury over the head with a wooden mallet, possibly at the behest of Rattenbury’s wife, Alma, who was Stonor’s lover and 20 years older then him.

Rattigan saw the dramatic potential in exposing the mores of the time, when people seemed more concerned about the scandal of an older woman seducing her younger servant. Indeed, after Alma committed suicide following the trial (she was acquitted), more than 3,000 people attended her interment at Wimborne Road Cemetery, jeering and screaming as the coffin was lowered into an unmarked grave.

Writer Michael Darlow says Rattigan wanted to show “how public prejudice places different values on the same events” and even though the playwright was dying of cancer at the time, he succeeded.

• Cause Celebre is at the Old Vic from March 17 to June 11.