Full circle for Nadia Parkes as she makes professional stage debut in Chichester

But it gets even better than that. For Nadia there is a wonderful sense of coming full circle with the piece.

The House Party offers a modern adaptation of Miss Julie by August Strindberg; and it was Stringberg indirectly who got her into drama school.

“I auditioned to get into LAMDA with a monologue from Patrick Marber’s version of Miss Julie which was called After Miss Julie. That was the speech that got me on the three-year training course so it just feels wonderful to come full circle right now with exactly the same character that got me into LAMDA. It definitely feels like someone somewhere is looking after me and that someone somewhere is trying to tell me something… though I am not quite sure what that something is yet!”

A co-production with Headlong in association with Frantic Assembly, The House Party runs from Friday, May 3-Saturday, June 1. The piece offers a wild party, a friendship, a cherished pet and a night that changes everything.

It’s Julie’s 18th birthday, and she’s throwing a party in her father’s extravagant townhouse. Her boyfriend has just dumped her and her long-suffering best friend Christine is trying to pick up the pieces. As the revellers pile into the booze, down in the kitchen Christine and her boyfriend Jon – son of Julie’s cleaner – clear up and dare to dream of the future.

As Nadia says: “She hosts this party in rebellion to celebrate how she feels it should be celebrated correctly. I think it would be very easy to judge Julie and say she is a very privileged and awful and bitchy person but Laura's writing was so brilliant that when I read it I could not stop crying. I think it's because you have to understand Julie’s character and that she’s the way she is because she is just so broken and so alone. And that drives her into some pretty bad decisions and an exterior that can come across as pretty awful. But really I see her as magnetic and really wonderful. She's just lost and she's just growing up and I have a lot of empathy for her.

"Holly (Race Roughan, the director) keeps laughing about me because I protect her so much. She does do some questionable things but I think it is my job to stand up for her and to stand up for the role. I have a lot of love for her and what she brings. And the fact is that she brings a lot of fun into people's lives. And that's the main reason that Christine is drawn to her as her best friend.

“It's a three-hander in terms of the principals and the dialogue, and working with Rachelle (Diedericks as Christine) and Josh (Finan as Jon) is absolutely a dream come true. They are brilliant actors. It is how they present the text in rehearsals and how they are just so open in rehearsals to anything that comes out of us.

"We are 100 per cent just finding out at the moment what each of us needs to do and what the relationships between us need to be and what we need to emphasise to drive the story and what moments we can steal for ourselves. It is just so much fun working with them.”

Tickets from Chichester Festival Theatre.