Di and Viv and Rose

Amelia Bullimore studied Drama at Manchester University, UK. She started out as an actress, began writing in 1995 and continues to do both. Her first stage play, Mammals had an extended sell-out run at the Bush Theatre in April 2005 and a successful national tour in 2006. The play had its American Preview in 2009. Mammals was co-winner of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and shortlisted for the What's On Best New Comedy Award. Her adaptation of Ibsen's Ghosts was her second play and premiered at the Bush Theatre, London 2009.

It achieves what it sets out to do - show how the lives of a trio of women are shaped by their friendship over some twenty-seven years - in a manner that brims over with warm, effervescent humour and sharp, unsentimental perceptiveness ... The long vista of the years helps Bullmore to show with moving clarity the intricate way that life and friendship inform each other and how the stock of mutual memories can contain both smarting, buried grievances and the means to dissolve them eventually in shared, helpless laughter. -- Paul Taylor Independent 20130124 A deeply felt account of female friendship. It's written with a remarkable economy and freshness, and rings true even, or especially, in its moments of absurdity. In Bullmore's hands the problem she has set herself - of writing a story spanning three decades in which only the three women appear on stage - is solved by using a deceptively light bantering dialogue which occasionally turns into pointed comments and then outright slanging matches. Humour is always only a batted eyelash away ... this is an emotionally satisfying and perceptive account of three real lives. It's that dense ... This is a story of female friendship that is neither sentimental, nor nostalgic. It just feels real. -- Aleks Sierz Arts Desk 20130124 It connects emotionally with the audience, and is wittily written ... Bullmore makes you like, and believe in, her three characters ... The play also has a careering energy ... impossible not to like. -- Michael Billington Guardian 20130125 There is a mixture of warmth, humour and sadness in ... the writing ... that is very special indeed ... But this is also a play that cuts deeply and asks hard questions, about the nature of kindness for instance, and the way friendship can decay just like everything else. There are moments in the second half that are overwhelmingly moving as the characters experience the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. -- Charles Spencer Telegraph 20130125 The