Di and Viv and Rose

Description

'How do you want to live here? I mean we could come and go and lead separate lives. Or we could really live together. What do you think?' Aged 18, three women join forces. Life is fun. Living is intense. Together they feel unassailable. Crackling with wisdom and wit, Di and Viv and Rose is a humorous and thoughtful exploration of friendship's impact on life and life's impact on friendship. Di and Viv and Rose charts the steady but sometimes chaotic progression of these three women's lives and their ultimately enduring bonds. The varied journeys of their lives take their toll on the characters, forcing them apart and stretching their relationships with each other to a near breaking point.

Amelia Bullimore studied Drama at Manchester University, UK. She started out as an actress, began writing in 1995 and continues to do both. Her first stage play, Mammals had an extended sell-out run at the Bush Theatre in April 2005 and a successful national tour in 2006. The play had its American Preview in 2009. Mammals was co-winner of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and shortlisted for the What's On Best New Comedy Award. Her adaptation of Ibsen's Ghosts was her second play and premiered at the Bush Theatre, London 2009.

It achieves what it sets out to do - show how the lives of a trio of women are shaped by their friendship over some twenty-seven years - in a manner that brims over with warm, effervescent humour and sharp, unsentimental perceptiveness . . . The long vista of the years helps Bullmore to show with moving clarity the intricate way that life and friendship inform each other and how the stock of mutual memories can contain both smarting, buried grievances and the means to dissolve them eventually in shared, helpless laughter. -- Paul Taylor * Independent * A deeply felt account of female friendship. It's written with a remarkable economy and freshness, and rings true even, or especially, in its moments of absurdity. In Bullmore's hands the problem she has set herself - of writing a story spanning three decades in which only the three women appear on stage - is solved by using a deceptively light bantering dialogue which occasionally turns into pointed comments and then outright slanging matches. Humour is always only a batted eyelash away ... this is an emotionally satisfying and perceptive account of three real lives. It's that dense ... This is a story of female friendship that is neither sentimental, nor nostalgic. It just feels real. -- Aleks Sierz * Arts Desk * It connects emotionally with the audience, and is wittily written ... Bullmore makes you like, and believe in, her three characters ... The play also has a careering energy ... impossible not to like. -- Michael Billington * Guardian * There is a mixture of warmth, humour and sadness in ... the writing ... that is very special indeed ... But this is also a play that cuts deeply and asks hard questions, about the nature of kindness for instance, and the way friendship can decay just like everything else. There are moments in the second half that are overwhelmingly moving as the characters experience the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. -- Charles Spencer * Telegraph * The pulling power is in the snap of individual lines, in the register of daily life, the gradual piling up of memories that eventually accumulate to make a shared history. -- Susannah Clapp * Observer * The texture and detail of the play feels so real, the dialogue is so salty and authentic, and the bond between the three so frankly, warmly explored -- Sarah Hemming * Financial Times * Amelia Bullmore's three-hander is a big, warm-hearted piece about female friendship which doesn't - as friends don't - shy away from occasional hard-hitting home truths. -- Fiona Mountford * Evening Standard * Funny, universal and wise. It is about friendship, sexuality, and sex, growing up and changing tack, intimacy and comradeship, corsetry and careers, success, disaster and dissatisfaction. It compasses illness, loss, loneliness and loyalty ... It's a play that will last. -- Libby Purves * The Times * [Bullmore] handles the change in moods expertly. And she offers each of these contrasting characters equal shift . . . And even when the mood turns sourest, Bullmore has some blackly funny one-liners in reserve. It's a moving, memorable evening. -- Dominic Maxwell * The Times *