Omnibus: The Dressmaker, The Bottle Factory Outing and An Awfully Big Adventure

Omnibus edition including The Dressmaker, The Bottle Factory Outing and An Awfully Big Adventure.

The Dressmaker
Wartime Liverpool is a place of ration books and jobs in munitions factories. Rita, living with her two aunts Nellie and Margo, is emotionally naive and withdrawn. When she meets Ira, a GI, at a neighbour's party she falls in love almost as much with the idea of life as a GI bride as with the man himself.
Nellie and Margo, however, are not blinded by love, as Rita is. Life has taught them cynicism, and each can see this sullen, insensitive creature for what he is.

The Bottle Factory Outing
Freda and Brenda spend their days working in an Italian-run wine-bottling factory and their nights in a dismal bedsitter. Little wonder, then, that the works outing offers such promises for Freda, determined to capture the heart of Vittorio, and such terror for Brenda, constantly escaping the clutches of Rossi.
But passions run high on that chilly day of freedom, and life after the outing can - tragically - never return to normal.

An Awfully Big Adventure
It is 1950 and the Liverpool repertory theatre company is rehearsing its Christmas production of Peter Pan. 'I don't want any truck with symbolic interpretations,' Meredith tells his actors. 'As far as I'm concerned it's all pure fantasy.'
But then he hasn't taken into account the disturbing presence of young Stella, who has been hired as an assistant stage manager. Babbling of night-lights in the nursery, of lost mothers and the ticking of clocks, Stella begins to revive an entirely different drama in which O'Hara is doomed to play the lead.