Who we are:
Inseparable Productions is a new theatre company founded by Anastasia Bunce and Grace Joy Howarth. They are dedicated to staging modern classics and adaptations. A key aim is to uncover hidden gems and stories that have rarely been seen onstage before, with a desire to connect with contemporary audiences who may not typically engage with this material.
We are staging the world premiere of The Inseparables by Grace Joy Howarth, based on the recently rediscovered critically acclaimed novel by Simone de Beauvoir, opens at the multi-award-winning Finborough Theatre for a four-week limited season on Tuesday, 15 April 2025. Based on the translation by Lauren Elkin, the piece will be directed by Anastasia Bunce and produced by Inseparable Productions.
We are fundraising towards the essential costs of paying our actors and creatives. As a new independent company without funding your help will be essential in helping to make this a reality! We need your help to get this on stage! Any amount you are able to donate, and even sharing this page, will take us one step closer to our goal of making this a reality.
What's it about?
France during the First World War.
Nine-year-old Sylvie Lapage prays for France to be saved from the war, but her miracle arrives in the form of the new girl at school… Andrée is unlike anyone else – wildly bright and full of life.
Finally, Sylvie has someone who makes her laugh, someone to talk to about literature, equality, war, and religion, someone to call her closest friend. As the girls become inseparable, they battle against the strictness of their sheltered Catholic bourgeois upbringing.
But as the girls grow up and face the mounting pressures of becoming a young woman, will they ever find the freedom they both hunger for?
Startlingly poignant, The Inseparables tells the true story of an intimate female friendship that shaped one of the most important thinkers and feminists of the 20th century.
Written five years after her seminal feminist text The Second Sex, The Inseparables was never published during Simone de Beauvoir’s lifetime, on the advice of her life-long partner, the existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre. Finally published in 2020, it was critically acclaimed as a rediscovered classic, and now is adapted for the theatre for the very first time.
The press on the novel The Inseparables
‘It thoroughly deserves to be found.’ The Spectator
‘Her lost novella is finally published…Simone de Beauvoir put aside this novella in 1954 because Sartre scoffed at it. He was wrong.’ The Times
‘Mesmerising.’ The New Yorker
'Gorgeously written, intelligent, passionate.' Oprah Daily
‘The enigma of female friendship that is as intense as a love affair, but that is not sexually expressed is always an interesting subject.’ Deborah Levy, The Guardian
'A rich and rewarding novella.' Literary Review
‘The Inseparables invites us to cherish friendship, and how it makes and breaks us in a precarious and cruel world.’ Church Times