Di and Viv and Rose: ★★★★ from The Daily Mail

Di and Viv and Rose Review
By Quentin Letts, The Daily Mail

The play is hard to resist, mainly thanks to the bewitching character of Rose.

She is played by Anna Maxwell Martin and we meet her first on the payphone of her new college digs.

Enter Di, a sporty, plain-talking lesbian (Tamzin Outhwaite), and Viv, a repressed intellectual. Feminist Viv (Gina McKee) wears such dowdy, 1940s-style clothes that Rose refers to her as Mrs Miniver.

Yet the three girls soon become friends and they decide to share a house.

On one level the play is a simple tale of young women growing up together, a campus version of TV’s Liver Birds. Most of the first half takes place in the living room of their digs. It is a scene many 1980s graduates may recognise. Yet Miss Bullmore also, with gentle warmth, writes a chatty, arresting elegy to friendship – I should perhaps say female friendship.

So long as Miss Maxwell Martin is on the stage, the thing bubbles. I say that not only because her Rose reminded me – hauntingly – of my wife’s dearest friend but because this is a gentle, affectionate work which deserves a fair wind.

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