The remarkable tale of the Mitford sisters on the Eastbourne stage

SussexWorld

The remarkable story of the Mitford sisters hits the stage in Eastbourne as The Party Girls by Amy Rosenthal finally gets its premiere after long Covid delays.

Transcript

00:00Good morning, my name is Phil Hewitt, Creep Arts Editor at Sussex Newspapers. Lovely to speak to

00:06Amy Rosenthal this morning about a play which has been a long time in the coming. It should have

00:11happened before the pandemic and was deemed delayed and you were talking about a kind of

00:15suppressed hysterical excitement as you get close to the time it gets on stage and it's heading to

00:21the Ettenshire Park Theatre Eastbourne, September the 23rd to the 27th. It's The Party Girls,

00:27The Mitford Sisters, a fabulous title for a play about The Mitford Sisters.

00:32What drew you to these crazy, crazy women? Well, I was commissioned to write about them

00:40by a different theatre company some years ago and I didn't know that much about them really. I knew

00:47that two of them were fascists and close personal friends with Hitler and I knew that one of them

00:53was a communist and I knew about Nancy Mitford because she was a celebrated novelist and I had

00:59read her books and I knew the little one Debo became the Duchess of Devonshire. So I had a kind

01:04of surface understanding of who they were but really when I started to research it, a whole other

01:11landscape opened up in terms of how fascinating, complex, varied they were and what an absolute treat

01:21for a dramatist. Absolutely. I guess the thing is how one family can go in so many different directions.

01:27Yeah, yeah, yeah and how that kind of starts in the nursery, in the schoolroom. They had quite big gaps

01:34between them in age, some of them, and their father refused to let them go to school so they

01:42self-educated on books in the library and newspaper cuttings and they went to extremes and their

01:52politics were kind of defined in relation to each other. So there's something very infantile about the

01:58way it all starts out and then they become increasingly radicalised.

02:03That sounds extraordinary and what makes them so interesting? Is it the differences between them or

02:09all the things that they have in common? I think it's both. I think the whole play in a way

02:15and I guess everything I am drawn to as a writer is about kind of holding the extremes of light and

02:21dark at the same time and saying you can be this and you can also be this. And so yeah, I'm fascinated

02:31by their differences, by what drove them apart and drove them apart to such an extent that certainly two of

02:37them didn't see each other for 30 years but also that they have this common ground that there is

02:43a kind of Mitford personality and that you know in my interpretation of Jessica Decker Mitford,

02:51who's the heart of my play, she's always on the run from what her family represents but in the end she

02:58has to square up to the fact that she also is one of them and that everything they are

03:05is filtered in some way into her as well.

03:07And it must be such a challenge to get such an unruly family into one evening theatre entertainment.

03:13Yeah, I think so and I suppose by making Jessica the linchpin of it that allowed me to condense it to some

03:23extent but it does, it covers a large area of time and also place because it moves between their

03:30family home in Swinbrook in the Cotswolds to America where Jessica went and to France where Nancy

03:41and Diana went and fleetingly to Germany. So it does, it covers a lot of ground.

03:47And how lovely at long last it's going to be on the stage after, well, plenty of delays.

03:53Big wait, yes.

03:55Brilliant. Well, congratulations. Lovely to speak to you. It sounds absolutely fascinating.

04:01Devonshire Park Theatre Respawn, September 23rd to the 27th. Thank you.

04:06Thank you very much.

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