IT’S a musical which has brought history to life and in so doing has proved that on rare occasions the impossible can happen.

The story of Six the Musical, which opens at The Lowry on Tuesday, is so unlikely that if it were pitched as an idea for a show it would be rejected out of hand.

For the production was written in just 10 days by two Cambridge undergraduates at the same time as they were revising for their final exams, became the must-see show at the Edinburgh Festival and then transferred straight into London’s West End.

Lucy Moss who co-wrote and is now directing the national tour of Six laughs when I suggest that this playwriting lark must be an easy business.

“When we wrote it, we had no idea that it was ever going to do anything more than a student show that was going to go to the Edinburgh Fringe,” she said,

“I think that really helped us as we didn’t have any pressure on us when we were writing it. We just wrote it very casually.”

Lucy and creative partner Toby Marlow first started to work on Six in January 2017 when the university’s musical theatre society was given a slot at that summer’s Edinburgh Festival.

“Toby applied and got the gig and we then had to work out what we were going to fill it with,” she said. “We knew from January that we were going to do the story of the six wives of Henry VIII as a pop concert but that’s really all we had at that stage.”

From that original idea, Six the musical quickly developed.

“We wrote it over six months but because were were in the final year of our degrees, there were only around 10 days of actual writing.

“On first day of writing we came up with structure for the show which was the wives having a competition to see which one of them had had the worst time with each of them having a song to put their case.”

For Edinburgh the show was just short of an hour but has now been extended into a 75 minute concert/history lesson/girl power spectacular.

The six wives are backed by an all-girl band live on stage and the all-original score is both historically accurate and hugely entertaining.

“Unlike a lot of other musicals where you have to create the back stories, with the six wives there is so much information about them it was more about selecting what pieces of information we wanted to include,” said Lucy. “It probably helped that I was studying history at the time, although I didn’t study the six wives. But I did study Hans Holbein (the portrait painter and subject of a Euro-disco song Haus of Holbein in the show). I’m really worried that my supervisor is going to come to the show and think ‘really, that’s what you took from three years of studying!’.”

Six the musical has almost developed a life of its own since arriving in Edinburgh last year.

“I suppose it could have been overwhelming if we’d had chance to think about it,” said Lucy. “But from Edinburgh we had to rewrite the show and make it longer for a London showcase and then take it into the West End.

“We knew wanted to write something original and it’s certainly not a normal musical theatre show.”

Among the many plaudits Six the musical has received, many have honed in on the way it has brought history to a new audience.

“We wanted to share the parallels with female experiences today compared to Tudor times. I’d love it for schools to come and see it. It shows there is so much more than learning about Henry VIII.”

Lucy and Toby are one of the hottest creative teams in theatre, a second show they wrote as students, Hot Gay Time Machine, has also been performed in the West End.

“Things like that don’t happen, but here we are,” she laughed.

Six the musical, the Lowry, Salford Quays, Tuesday, December 4 to Saturday, December 16. Details from 0843 208 6005 or www.thelowry.com