It’s heartening to see the continuing rehabilitation of Terence Rattigan, previously condemned as an irremediably middle-class writer of “well-made” plays.

This elegant, sensitive revival of his 1954 masterpiece, rounding off another cracking season for a revitalised Chichester, reminds us Rattigan sets all manner of emotions pulsating under the polished surfaces of his dramas.

His master touch in this interconnected double bill is to have the two leading actors — a terrific pairing of Gina McKee and Iain Glen — play different characters either side of the interval, while everyone else in this private Bournemouth hotel remains the same. These two perfectly formed halves combine to portray what director Philip Franks describes in a programme note as “the tragedy of heterosexuality” and “the tragedy of homosexuality”. For the second act, Franks has chosen a version of the play never performed in Rattigan’s lifetime, in which the homosexual nature of the Major’s “crime” is made explicit in a way that would never have got past the Lord Chamberlain.

It’s an electric first glance that McKee, pale, interesting and as lovely as ever, and Glen, a wonderfully pitched fading firecracker, shoot each other across the dining room as Anne and John. They might be long divorced but this doesn’t stop them drawing together again in neediness and desire. Around them, the other residents, skilfully drawn pen-portraits all, lead genteel lives of stagnation and loneliness.

In the second half, Stephanie Cole’s redoubtable battleaxe, Mrs Railton-Bell, comes into her own, persecuting the Major (Glen, a wrenching tangle of borrowed pride and own-brand shame) and condemning her adult daughter (McKee) to perpetual childishness. She hasn’t, however, counted upon the proto-liberal sympathy, expressed with such classic British reserve, stirred up by worldly-wise landlady Miss Cooper (spot-on Deborah Findlay). In every sense, another victory for Rattigan.

Until 3 October (www.cft.org.uk)