‘I am a trailblazer,” declares Charly – “a female drug dealer.” Phones at her hips, gunslinger style, she cranks up the Beastie Boys and prepares to boss the day from her south London flat.
In Martha Watson Allpress’s new play, Charly speaks in couplets, though promises to stop “if the rhyming thing gets boring / If I begin to hear hints of snoring.” No danger of that: Alexa Davies’ glinting performance opens in a cascade of energy, and buoyant rhymes seem just right for gobby Charly, who is chipper, self-aware, with a gleam in her eye. This work comes easily to her – “you just need gravitas and a positive attitude” – and she makes it sound ethical-ish: “I am the Santa Claus of dealing, fam.” The chiming text reassures us that everything is in place (“pun intended / I am mended”).
She hopes for a dealer’s groundhog day – wake, sell, repeat – to dull the sting of her breakup with a “trust fund darling”. Yet the rhapsodic swim of rolling sound and coloured lights in Emily Aboud’s production keep cutting out, plunging back into greyscale. We learn that Charly is unshowered, flanked by crusty laundry and has just stepped in last-night’s pizza. It’s not exactly a picture of girlboss success.
When a power cut silences her phones, she panics at the quiet and dead air. She ventures out for hash browns, meets a clutch of “poundshop Morrisseys” in the flat below, listening to collaborative jazz on their battery-powered boombox. It’s not the day she had planned. The rhymes lose their snap – they are the structure her confidence runs on, and Charly is coming off the rails. No one has ever said “it’s fine” so often, with such increasing lack of conviction.
Charly describes her life as a house on an eroding cliff, poised for calamity. As Jonathan Chan’s lighting douses her in deep shadow, Davies beautifully layers bounce and misery. Though effective, Lady Dealer feels incomplete – the hour-long show takes Charly to her lowest ebb, but it’s perhaps a too-linear journey. We don’t need telling that she’s not really fine. The more pressing question is: what might she do next and how would Watson Allpress write her? This Peckham trailblazer deserves a second act.
• At Roundabout, Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 27 August.
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