Life In Squares For BBC Two

BBC Two has released further details about its new drama Life In Squares, which delves into the lives of the revolutionary Bloomsbury group.

Written by Amanda Coe (Room At The Top) and produced by Ecosse Films in association with Tiger Aspect Productions, Life In Squares explores the close, yet often fraught, relationship between painter Vanessa Bell and her sister Virginia Woolf, alongside Vanessa's complicated alliance with gay artist Duncan Grant.

Together they, and their like-minded friends, navigate their way through love, sex and artistic life in the first half of the 20th century, a time in which they legendarily “lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles.”

The drama begins with the Stephen sisters in 1905 as Vanessa (Phoebe Fox) and Virginia (Lydia Leonard), struggle to escape the stuffiness of Victorian England. They soon start to forge a life of bohemian freedom, in which their friendship with Bloomsbury contemporaries Duncan Grant (James Norton), Lytton Strachey (Ed Birch), Clive Bell (Sam Hoare) and John Maynard Keynes (Edmund Kingsley) blooms and turns to love, in many combinations.

In the 1930s, the drama then follows an older Vanessa and Virginia (Eve Best and Catherine McCormack), as they settle into marriage and creative success. Despite the beauty of the life Vanessa creates at Charleston, it is turbulent. As war looms once again, Virginia's mental anguish returns, though her love for her sister never wavers. Vanessa, meanwhile, is forced to confront, through the pain of many losses, the success or failure of her extraordinary experiments in living.

Life In Squares is an Ecosse Films production, in association with Tiger Aspect Productions, and has been commissioned for the BBC by Ben Stephenson and Lucy Richer. It is written by Amanda Coe, produced by Rhonda Smith (Fresh Meat, Mistresses), and directed by Simon Kaijser (Don't Ever Wipe Tears Without Gloves), with Lucy Bedford, Amanda Coe, Douglas Rae and Lucy Richer as executive producers.

Filming took place on location in London and at Charleston Farmhouse, East Sussex.

Life In Squares is expected to air on BBC Two later this summer.

www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre

(JP)