As someone who moved into a university hall of residence and started queuing for the communal phone in 1986, the fast-moving opening scenes and ’80s pop in CoPs’ production of Di and Viv and Rose immediately made me feel nostalgic for those times.
The play follows the lives of three women who met at university in Manchester in 1983. I had deliberately not researched the play before I watched it and as soon as the action started, the three actors – Hannah Tuson-Heasley (Di), Loretta Freeman (Viv) and Becky Done (Rose) – quickly established that these women and their complex relationships with one another would be at the heart of the evening. From the early days finding out what these 18-year-olds thought of each other through the student days where the lifelong bonds of friendship formed, ending in 2010 when, in their 40s, significant life events for all three women had tested these friendships.
The big success of Claudia McKelvey’s direction was the real emotional investment I felt in all three characters from early in the production, and this never dipped. The set at the Little Theatre was a minimal black box, which the actors expertly adapted over the evening to portray many different venues including Marylebone station, a New York apartment, outside a church, a hill and most notably throughout the majority of Act 1, the trio’s student flat ‘Mossbank’. The use of furniture and sound to change each location worked well, though maybe as the student flat featured for a lot of the play, some period posters or even a bike or two up the corner may have given the set a more studenty feel.
The music throughout the evening was excellent and carried us through the years of the narrative. I also liked the use of projection onto the screen during the story, and its use at the end to give an all too brief glimpse back to happier times was very effective. Perhaps this screen could have been used to provide some additional interest during a few of the longer scene transitions.
Credit must also go to the wardrobe for this production, from Shelagh Maughan, with costumes spanning 27 years very effectively. The transition of Viv from Land Girl to New York chic matched the change in tone of the narrative in these scenes well and took us back to Viv’s discussion about clothing earlier in the play. Perhaps a tailored coat could have worked to carry Viv’s chic through to the funeral. The bright ’80s student clothes were exactly what was needed (Rose’s dayglo pink number was genius!)
Special praise is needed for the direction and acting during the two shocking revelations of the play, which both provided a significant gear change. The lighting and style of these scenes delivered a real emotional punch. The script, when the audience realised we were at a funeral and not a wedding, felt very jarring – extremely well-written – and provided an entirely unexpected and heart-breaking eulogy from Di.
Amelia Bullmore’s play defines three very different women who, at first, seem unlikely friends. Viv, who initially sports 1940s clothes and is the most studious and ambitious of the students, is probably the most closed book of the three, emotionally. Loretta’s Viv was a very real person. The scene in which she explained her interest in corsetry was so engaging – not something I’d ever have foreseen myself writing! Her excitement about the work in New York and subsequent changes in her outlook on life were very well handled. Her drunken outburst in the churchyard was both heartbreaking and funny at the same time.
Di is a sporty business student, and Hannah brought a lot of comedy to the character’s early scenes looking for love and understanding the politics of the canteen’s ‘lesbian table’. I think that this early light-heartedness from the character made her later scenes, after a shocking attack in Mossbank and with her health problems at the end of the play, even more emotional. These can’t have been easy scenes to play, but the acting was so engaging through Di’s horrific experiences.
Rose seemed to me the most complex of the three women, in some ways happy-go-lucky with a very matter of fact approach to sleeping her way around many of the university’s men, yet in other ways quite sweet and seemingly naïve. Becky brought a lot of depth to her portrayal of Rose (she injected quite a bit of mystery into ‘Charlie’ who we never met) as well as an ever-present sense of humour even during her rather unexpected pregnancy with the twins.
Description of the individual characters and actors, however, is not really what Di and Viv and Rose was about. The strength and success of CoPs’ production was the friendship and interplay between these three women. This was at its most powerful in the ‘den’ constructed by the teenagers at Mossbrook during some of their darkest times. An utterly believable trio of friends.
Di and Viv and Rose by Amelia Bullmore directed by Claudia McKelvey, played 13th-21th June 2025
