Sophie Melville gives a stunning, combative, savagely moving performance in Gary Owen’s 75-minute monologue about an exuberantly hedonistic young working-class Cardiff woman.
It’s confrontational in every sense: Melville’s Effie shoves her hard-drinking, hard-shagging lifestyle in our faces and dares us to judge her. If anything, the underlying political message about the steady, willed deprivation of the urban poor is more urgent now than when Melville first performed the play in 2015.
