Series 4, Episode 20 - Dream Girls by Hannah Goldstein

Okay, so Dreamgirls begins when two best friends, Helena and Ruthie, try to kill each other at a wedding.

And then the story cycles back through their many years of friendship, through all the moments of love and joy, but also betrayal and jealousy to see how they ended up at this point.

And I guess when I was thinking about this story, I really wanted to explore a friendship between two women that begins in adolescence and moves into early adulthood.

just because I think that's a time when friendships matter so much.

They can almost feel like a kind of falling in love.

But it's also a time when friendships come under pressure as people are trying to figure out who they are and who they're going to become.

So that's at the heart of the story.

And then, as we've already said, I was inspired by A Midsummer Night's Dream in the telling of the story.

Well, I'm sold.

I'm sold.

That's great.

True to form, similar to the story of A Midsummer Night's Dream, this is a book about dreams, about mirrors on the world.

It's about female friendships and perceptions of each other especially.

And I also think most of all it's about self-identity and that messy journey to finding happiness and that how people appear is not what they seem.

We follow these two women Helena and Ruthie as we mentioned the play is divided into the five act structure every chapter named after a line spoken by Helena from A Midsummer Night's Dream as well as in between a few others as well and you know We have Act 1 at school, Act 2 at uni, in the drama society, having sex, Act 3, going to London, Act 4, the wedding in question.

We'll not spoil anything further.

But we really...

These women have dreams with each other as friends.

But those dreams come together despite the fact they're from two very different sides of the world.

I mean, Helena, or Helen, is someone who is very well off, often hindered by her own head as much as anything, whereas Ruthie is very much, she's someone who is chasing that confidence.

And I love the fact that you have within these two, despite the fact that They're all dealing with challenges of themselves between each other.

They find themselves jealous of each other and also, incidentally, dream of the things and see the positives and the things that they love about that other person and just dream to be that other person in a way, which I love that mirroring of that.

Oh thank you so much yeah it was um it was a really interesting friendship to write because I think as you say they are both jealous of each other in various ways um and in in my mind part of the dynamic between them is that um Helena sort of pulls Ruthie into her dreams.

Ruthie is someone who doesn't necessarily have big dreams for herself when she's young.

And Helena is the person in her ear who is saying, we're going to finish school.