When I meet the writer on a video call she is sitting in her attic office flanked by the poster for her 2008 play On The Rocks, which parachutes its audience into the pre-World War One literary lives of DH Lawrence, his German wife Frieda, Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton when they lived together in a quasi-communal arrangement.
But that experience of writing real-life characters was of little help when it came to exploring – and reviving – such people as Unity Mitford, who idolised Hitler, and her sister Diana, who became the wife of British fascist Oswald Mosley.
“It was very challenging,” admits Rosenthal. “At the end of the show the actresses playing Unity (Ell Potter) and Diana (Elisabeth Dermot Walsh) have a ritual where they have to say goodbye to Unity and Diana – and Ell and Elisabeth are not Jewish. They have to do every night what I had to do in the writing, which was put myself into the shoes of people who have unthinkable views.
“But my other religion is writing for the theatre,” continues the playwright, “and everything I believe about good writing – and what I often feel disappointed or frustrated by when I go to the theatre – is about meeting that challenge.”
Deeply felt: Amy RosenthalRob Greig
To that end Rosenthal was determined not to write about “heroes or villains”. The emotional heart of the play is provided by the relationship between between Jessica Mitford and Bob Treuhaft (Joe Coen), the American Jewish civil rights lawyer. The couple were both members of the Communist Party and Rosenthal was determined that Treuhaft would be a conspicuous figure in her work.
“It was very important to me that Bob should be in the play. Jessica is a kind of moral centre to the story and it’s really about her negotiating her identity alongside her relationship with her family, and [that] she married a Jewish New Yorker.”
The structure of the play is like nothing Rosenthal has attempted before. It has an ambitious, time-vaulting, even epic scope that allows the playwright to explore not only the famously divergent and abhorrent views of the siblings, but the seeds of them. “The ages of the sisters diverged a lot but they did share this school room, which had communist regalia on one side and fascist on the other, which Jessica and Unity tended to to throw at each other when they had a fight. I suppose I wanted to look at the childishness of how it all began. With infantile and babyish sibling rivalry.”
That the sisters were isolated from other children also had an effect, says Rosenthal.
“Their father wouldn’t let them go to school because he believed that if women were educated, they would get thick ankles from playing hockey. So they self educated, and they read newspapers and they were somehow drawn to extremes. I was interested in how that childishness coalesced and hardened into something horrendous and dangerous.”
Amy with her mother Dame Maureen Lipman[Missing Credit]
Amy with the cast[Missing Credit]
Now 51, Rosenthal’s early career as a rising talent used to be overshadowed by her starry parents, the late and lauded TV writer Jack Rosenthal, who died of cancer in 2004, and her actress mother (and JC columnist) Dame Maureen Lipman. Only recently have reviews of Rosenthal’s work not mentioned her illustrious parents, she says.
It seems only right therefore to apologise in advance for Jack and Maureen being mentioned in this interview.
“It’s a blessing and a curse,” agrees the playwright. “It’s quite hard to rebel when you admire your parents so much. During rehearsals, and all the time really, I realise that so much of what I believe about good writing came from both of them and from a childhood spent sitting in the wings, watching and listening. I still think that they’re right about everything.”
The poster on the wall next to her speaks to a different difficulty encountered by Rosenthal during her playwrighting career – that of writer’s block. In On The Rocks – the play whose poster hangs by Rosenthal’s desk – Mansfield suffers from the condition. For Rosenthal, it hasn’t gone away.
“I once went to a hypnotherapist who talked me through it and asked what it felt like. I said it’s like a huge rock in the middle of my brain. She took me on this huge [imaginary] journey and at the very end I came back to find the rock was still resolutely there. I’ve tried a million things and I teach playwrighting a lot and through that help other people access ideas. But I would be lying if I said it wasn’t still there for me.”
Still, a new commission from Manhattan Theatre Club might stop the rock from rolling back into place. The impulse to write “has to be deeply felt”, says Rosenthal. “You can say a play is about the Mitford Sisters or D.H. Lawrence or whatever but really there is this whole other eco system which it is really about. It is that which I need to feel and which maybe requires some patience.”
The Party Girls is touring is at Oxford Playhouse from Sept 30 - Oct 4 and Birmingham Rep from Oct 6 – 11
