When Philip and Susan, a well-to-do English couple, are shipwrecked on an idyllic desert island you might be forgiven for thinking the scene would be set for a romantic love story, but, thanks to the presence of Susan’s lover Henry among the flotsam, things in The Little Hut take a more comic and complicated turn.

Henry manages to persuade Susan to confess their affair to her husband and the trio adopt a plan whereby each man spends a week with Susan, while the other retires to the little hut on the other side of the island.

The Little Hut, adapted by Nancy Mitford from André Roussin’s 1947 play, runs at the Rose Theatre from Monday and the production stars double Olivier Award winner Janie Dee as Susan, Robert Portal as Henry and Aden Gillett as Philip.

Twickenham resident Gillett says he was delighted to be offered the chance to perform in The Little Hut as it is a play that he has been aware of for a while.

“Quite a few years ago my mother was talking about plays that she saw when she was a young woman and she said that the funniest one she had ever seen was The Little Hut,” he explains.

“I had never even heard of it so I tracked it down. I didn’t have any work at that point and tried to find a way of mounting it, but a job came along and I put it on the back burner. Then about six months ago a friend rang to say he was thinking fo producing it - he didn’t expect anyone to have heard of it.”

The play was, according to Gillett, a “monster hit” in the 50s and in the same decade it was made into a film starring Ava Gardner and David Niven. Modern day audiences would be forgiven for not being too familiar with the piece though as it is rarely performed these days - so how would Gillett describe The Little Hut to curious theatregoers?

“It’s a strange one off piece,” he says.

“I haven’t read the French version and Mitford’s version makes it seem like an English play. It’s got a Cowardesque feel, it’s a light comedy with surreal flights of fancy in it. It harks back to the time of the empire when the English were rather more important than they are now.”

The Little Hut, Rose Theatre, May 10 - 15, for show times and to book tickets, visit rosetheatrekingston.org