While the dispute between Diane Samuels and actor Tracy-Ann Oberman over authorship of the play 3 Sisters on Hope Street flares up into a full-blown public row, the Liverpool Everyman, where 3 Sisters received its world premiere, this weekend hosts Samuel’s latest play Calais. Samuels tells Notebook that the work “captures the moment when the writer Mary Shelley, aged 16, arrives in France with her married lover, the poet Shelley.
They have eloped, in true bohemian fashion, with Mary’s stepsister in tow. Then things heat up when Mary’s rather more conventional stepmother pursues them to recover her daughter.” So it seems that, at least on stage, Samuels is moving on from the controversy surrounding her collaboration with Oberman who, by the way, is currently appearing at the Hampstead Theatre in an extended run of Amy Rosenthal’s On the Rocks. At least, sort of. Samuels also described her new play as, well, a “follow-on from 3 Sisters on Hope Street”.
