The award-winning, critically acclaimed production of Rose transfers to the West End this summer, playing at the Ambassadors Theatre for 28 performances only from 23 May. We spoke to award-winning writer Martin Sherman about this powerful one-woman play.

What inspired you to write Rose’s story?

It was 1999, the millennium was approaching, and I wanted to examine what Jewish life had been like in the 20th century.  And then somehow that focused itself into the life of one woman.

Do you feel the content is more relevant now than when you first wrote it?

I truly wish it had ceased to be pertinent but I’m afraid it is, if anything, more relevant than when I wrote it.  Anti-semitism has had a resurgence in ways we never would have imagined twenty some years ago. There are more refugees now than we can ever remember, and they are often unwanted and unwelcome. The world is in almost every way more dangerous than when the supposedly bright new twenty-first century was about to come to pass.

Maureen Lipman previously played the role of Rose and will be portraying her for the run at the Ambassadors Theatre. Did you have her in mind when you wrote the part?

I did have Maureen in mind when I wrote the role.  She had previously played (brilliantly) the lead in my play, Messiah, but she was too young for Rose then.  The role was originated by Olympia Dukakis, who was wonderful, at the National but now finally the time is ripe, and she [Maureen] is Rose, and it is a soul-shattering performance.

People will be familiar with another of your plays, Bent, which focuses on the persecution of homosexuals during the holocaust. How important do you feel it is to tell these stories? And on the whole, do you think we have learnt anything from them as a society?

We have to tell the stories we have to tell, it’s as simple as that; and often they involve history behaving unkindly.  But if we don’t speak about inhumanity, we are condoning it.  I wish I could say that our stories have taught society lessons but I’m not certain they have.  I think sometimes they enable individuals to learn, to think, to regret, to change, and sometimes social attitudes do alter as a result, but equally sometimes they stay as is, or even regress.  When I wrote Bent, the idea of gay marriage was a fantasy, now it is a reality in many countries.  So things do change for the better, and telling our stories has helped.  On the other hand, although the play has been produced in, for instance,  Poland, about a third of that country have recently passed new laws that make it more difficult to live openly as gay citizens.  So sometimes, our stories fall on deaf ears.  Sometimes they even cause deafness.  And yet they must continue to be told.

Are there any stories that you would still like to tell, that you haven't had the chance to write down yet?

I don’t really know.  Sometimes I think I have nothing new to say and then seemingly out of the blue, a subject will hit me.  Sometimes it doesn’t.  Meanwhile, there are so many gifted young writers who have new stories to tell with new perspectives and new attitudes and ways of thinking that challenge my own, and I am anxious to hear them, and be moved by them, and even to object to them.  I am hungry for discourse and divergence and healthy argument.

Rose plays at London’s Ambassadors Theatre from 23 May-18 June, with tickets available here.