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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