‘Life In Squares’ commences filming
Casting has been announced for Amanda Coe‘s new BBC Two drama, Life In Squares as filming commences.
The ensemble cast stars Phoebe Fox (A Poet In New York), Lydia Leonard (Wolf Hall), James Norton (Happy Valley), Sam Hoare (An Adventure In Space And Time), Ben Lloyd-Hughes (Divergent), Edmund Kingsley (The Borgias), and Ed Birch (Sherlock).
The cast also includes a wealth of established and acclaimed talent: Eve Best (Nurse Jackie, The Honourable Woman), Catherine McCormack (28 Weeks Later, Lights Out), Rupert Penry-Jones (Spooks, Silk), Jack Davenport (The Good Wife, Pirates Of The Caribbean), Elliot Cowan and Andrew Havill.
Starting in 1901 with the death of Queen Victoria, the drama tells the story of the lives and loves of the extraordinary Bloomsbury Group, dramatising the close and often fraught relationship between sisters, Vanessa Bell (Fox) and Virginia Woolf (Leonard), and Vanessa’s sexually complicated alliance with gay artist Duncan Grant (Norton) as they, and their group of like-minded friends, Lytton Strachey (Birch), Clive Bell (Hoare) and Maynard Keynes (Kingsely), aspire to build a world of their own design, pursuing their passions and desires without constraint: a distinctive lifestyle in which they legendarily ‘lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles’.
The story of their early years is told alongside the later lives of Vanessa and Virginia (Best and McCormack), settled into marriage, motherhood and in Virginia’s case enjoying huge public acclaim, but struggling to reconcile themselves to the heartache of loss, betrayal and mental anguish. And the turbulent legacy they unwittingly enacted on generations to come, in particular Vanessa and Duncan’s daughter Angelica, played by Lucy Boynton
Executive producer Lucy Bedford said: “Life In Squares gets under the skin of the Bloomsbury Group to lay bare the very human and emotional story of a group of people determined to find their own path in life. Locked in a perpetual struggle to reconcile their heads with their hearts, they loved and worked with great passion and forged lives that still resonate today.
“At heart, Life In Squares is about family – about the families we try to escape, the ones we end up creating and the different kinds of damage love can do. Amanda Coe’s scripts are beautifully wrought, Simon Kaijser’s vision is immense and we couldn’t be more excited to have assembled this amazing cast whose creativity and talent is every bit as potent as the characters they portray.”
The drama is an Ecosse Films production, in association with Tiger Aspect.
Filming of Life In Squares will be taking place on location in London and at Charleston Farmhouse, the group’s iconic base in East Sussex.
