First performed in 2012, Amelia Bullmore’s acclaimed play, Di and Viv and Rose, traces the intertwined lives of three women from their late teens into their early 40s. It is a humorous and thoughtful exploration of friendship's impact on life and life's impact on friendship.

It also has three very strong roles for female actors, which was an obvious attraction when Tony Kingston was looking for a play for the BGT theatre group’s annual “summer project”. For the past few years, BGT has put on a show for the rentrée that features an all-female cast, specifically to encourage and promote young performers who either are studying or have studied stage performance.

Starring RachelKathryn Lloyd, Lina Peller and Céline Planata, Di and Viv and Rose follows the journey of its title characters through life until their mid-forties. “As a script it is strong in both comedy and tragedy has one or two moments of genuine shock and surprise,” Kingston, who is co-directing with his daughter, Ferelith, tells Delano. “But unlike our other summer project shows, in which the casts were entirely female, but the themes more general--the polarising effect of fear and disinformation on society in Wolves Are Coming For You, or the death penalty in The Road To Huntsville--this is really just about the three women and their relationships.”

Kingston says he has always been attracted to plays that deal with how people change over time and cites JB Priestley’s Time and the Conways as one of his favourites, but that it is rare to find a play that makes the women themselves the central theme without becoming overtly preachy or political. “This play achieves just that balance and I knew the moment I read it that this was the play I was looking for.”

The action starts in the 1980s, but Kingston explains that there is very little in the script or dialogue which pins it directly to that period so that he has not really felt the need to alter anything. “We will make token gestures in the design and sound- track to that era, but the audience shouldn’t expect the full-on Stranger Things experience,” he jokes.

The nature of the summer programme shows allows the actors to rehearse more intensely than the company’s larger cast shows, which are usually put on in late autumn. What’s more, the actors are given a contract and paid for their hours of rehearsal and performance. “This helps the actors gain more in-depth experience of character work as well as giving them important on-stage exposure, which is not always easy to get even in drama schools,” says Kingston.

New wave of young talent

Lloyd, Peller and Planata, all in their mid-20s,  will be familiar to BGT audiences from previous shows. But Kingston is delighted that a wave of new younger actors is also starting to emerge. He cites 18-year-old Eloise Heger-Hedløy, who has appeared in two larger BGT shows and is currently using her gap-year to work on a script based around the poetry of Emily Dickinson that the company is hoping to stage it in the spring next year. She is also currently auditioning for drama schools and will, says Kingston, quite likely feature in the summer project in the coming years. Then there is Alessandro Stasi, who was in last December’s We Happy Few, who is now studying acting at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts (LIPA) in the UK. Looking further ahead, Kingston is keen to mention two very talented young actresses, Caeli Colgan and Josie Hatch, both aged 16, who are helping backstage with the current show. “Both played central and powerful roles in shows at FEST (the festival of English-speaking school theatre) this year,” says Kingston.

Of service to the play

As for working with daughter Ferelith, Kingston says he has noticed a difference in confidence and experience since they last collaborated on The Road To Huntsville. In that time she completed her masters in theatre directing at the Gaiety School of Acting in Dublin and also gained some experience of what Kingston calls “the business-end of the industry” through work in London earlier in the summer.

“I think Ferelith has a similar concept of directing to my own, which is, in Nicholas Hytner’s words, ‘to be of service to the play’,” Kingston explains. “She not likely to impose her own pre-conception of a piece on to it, or encumber it with random design ideas, but will rather find ways of making the piece speak for itself through the actors.”

On a more practical level, working with Ferelith is valuable because of her closeness in both age and experience to the characters, says Kingston. “She has a much clearer grasp on how… situations would develop and is able to more easily bring clarity to those scenes. Therefore I feel very confident letting her do much more hands-on directing of scenes for this show, than perhaps I did last year.”

The BGT production of Amelia Bullmore’s Di and Viv and Rose is on at Neimënster, Thursday 29 & Friday 30 September & Saturday 1 October at 7.30pm Tickets and information at www.neimenster.lu