ROSIE Fleeshman completes a hattrick of performances in York by members of the Fleeshman acting family in 2018 tomorrow night.

Father David appeared in Lindsay Posner’s southern company for Romeo And Juliet and Richard III at this summer’s Shakespeare’s Rose Theatre on the Castle car park, playing Friar Laurence in the tragic teen romance and Lord Stanley in the distorted history play.

Brother Richard took the lead role of shipbuilder’s son Gideon Fletcher in Sting’s musical The Last Ship, docked at York Theatre Royal in late-June. Now Rosie will follow Richard into the Theatre Royal in her one-woman show, Narcissist In The Mirror, presented in the Studio tonight by Nothing To Declare Productions.

Winner of the Best New Play award at the 2018 Manchester Theatre Awards and Best Spoken Word Show at the 2017 Greater Manchester Fringe Festival, this dark comedy of life, ambition and millennial expectation was written by Rosie, whose performance is directed by her mother, actress Sue Jenkins.

“It’s drawn from my own life, but also from others, from people I’ve mixed with over the years, and you don’t have to be a detective to work out the similarities between me and ‘Narc’,” says Rosie.

In her play, Narcissus is a love addict, a starving artist and a lost soul searching for self-worth.Acerbic wit, punchy dialogue and intricate spoken word mark out an honest account of self-exploration that came out of Rosie going travelling solo for a year when she felt “completely lost, not getting any work after drama school”.

“I went to South East Asia, and I wasn’t going for a party but to question myself, and within weeks of coming back, I’d written the show,” she says.

“There are a lot of questions in the play that a lot of people will relate to. Over that year, I questioned my life, trying to work out life and the reality of life and the vast disparity between what you expect it to turn out to be and how it actually turns out.”

Rosie also mulled over being a “millennial”, born in 1992. “We’re told that we’re all a bit too expectant and disappointed and we don’t value anything, and I thought, ‘is that true? Am I like that?’” she says. “So there’s a lot in there about trying to make myself a ‘nicer and better’ person.

“That said, I just refer to the character in the play as ‘Narc’ because I didn’t want her to be named because I wanted her to be anyone.”

Narcissist In The Mirror is a play not only for millennials but for other generations too, Rosie stresses. “Every generation thinks the generation that follows is worse and that is symptomatic of the world we live in, but it’s only getting worse in this age of social media, but even with people who are achievers, you are only seeing the good bits, so it’s easy to think we are failing,” she says.

Rosie premiered her debut play in April 2017 but has declined to update it as the months have ticked by. “I look back at it now, thinking, ‘oh I wouldn’t have written it that way now’, but I’m not the same person now; I’ve changed,” she says.

“I may not feel that way about this or that any more, but now, going out on tour, I’m the performer, not the writer, and I have to check out as the writer and just accept the script as it is.”

Looking anew at Narc’s character, Rosie says: “I think she’s a combination of awful and yet completely aware of her faults as well, and that was therapeutic for me, when I questioned myself, asking ‘Am I a narcissist?’. Then I thought, ‘if I was that terrible, would I be questioning it?’.

“Creating this character, I was looking beyond myself and it was both alarming and reassuring that she is much worse than me: a psychotic, neurotic, difficult version of myself, and yet people really identify with this worse version of myself!”

Rosie wrote her play when she did not have a a penny to her name after her travels.

Her mother noted Rosie was writing “lots of poems”. “She said, ‘you should write a one-woman show and if you do, I’ll put it on for you and direct it’. Never in a million years did I think the play would do as well as it has, but we’ve had a great run and now I’ve been contacted by Lime Pictures, a TV company in Liverpool, about writing a series,” Rosie reveals. What’s more, she has set up a theatre company with producer and fellow writer Alex Slater to tour Narcissist In The Mirror. “We’ve called it Nothing To Declare Productions, which is ironic as we feel we have a lot to say,” says Rosie. You sense she will be having a lot more to say too.

Nothing To Declare Productions present Narcissist In The Mirror, York Theatre Royal Studio, tomorrow (October 24) at 7.45pm. Box office: 01904 623568 or at yorktheatreroyal.co.uk