The Party Girls: an insight into the gilded lives of the aristocratic Mitford family

The Party Girls

at the Oxford Playhouse

from September 30 to October 4

Review by JON LEWIS

DIRECTOR Richard Beecham’s Marlowe Theatre Canterbury’s production, written by Amy Rosenthal (daughter of dramatist Jack Rosenthal, and actress Maureen Lipman), gives audiences an insight into the gilded lives of the aristocratic Mitford family, focusing on five of the six sisters.

It’s a play that is relevant today because with rising anti-Semitism in the UK, it drives home the narrative that anti-Jewish hatred has a deep history in this country.

There are multiple scenes in the mid-to late 30s that show all five sisters at home in Swinbrook House, Oxfordshire. Two of the sisters were fascists. Diana (Elisabeth Dermot Walsh), who married Blackshirt politician Sir Oswald Mosley, married in Goebbels’ own home with Hitler as a guest. Unity (Ell Potter) was even more of a Hitler groupie, shooting herself after war broke out. Both sisters decorated their room with photographs and posters of Hitler with swastikas prominent. The other side of the room is the domain of Jessica (Emma Noakes), or Decca as she was nicknamed, pictures and bust of Lenin are prominent, red flags flying. A communist sympathiser, Decca ran off with her second cousin Esmond, who she married, to fight Franco in Spain.

Decca represents the positive spin on the sisters, exiled from the right-wingers, a single mother in Washington in 1942-3 working with civil servants on banning unnecessary car journeys. She has a relationship with New York Jewish lawyer Bob (Joe Coen), another sign of liberality.

Nancy (Kirsty Besterman), caustic and fatalistic, is a famous author, and in scenes set in the late 60s, is dying in her home in Versailles. Debo (Flora Spencer-Longhurst), who is less developed as a character, but in real life has probably had the biggest impact on life in England, eventually married the Duke of Devonshire, fulfilling an early ambition, and was responsible for renovating Chatsworth House in Derbyshire.

Rosenthal’s copious research shoehorns a lot of fascinating information into two hours. Well-acted, conventionally directed and well-intentioned, The Party Girls received a rapturous reception from a packed theatre.