Lady Dealer – Bush Theatre, London

Martha Watson Allpress’s Lady Dealer is a mile-a-minute play about a girl-bossing, poetic, witty drug dealer who is fine. Totally fine.

Lady Dealer

The more someone reassures us they’re fine, the more we know they’re not, right? Generally speaking it holds true in real life, and also very much in the dramatic format of the monologue.  Charly (Alexa Davies), the eponymous Lady Dealer of Martha Watson Allpress’s work, is fine.  Totally fine.  Today is just a normal day.  Exactly the same as yesterday.  Until something small happens, and then it’s not.  The same.  Or fine.  She should count herself lucky: for another girlboss I recall, it was the end of the world that did it.

But anyway, the play opens and Charly is fine.  It’s going to be another regular day. She doesn’t miss her ex Clo.  She’s over it.  She’s got her phones – person and burner – she’s ready for business.  Dealing is a good job, not scary at all.  And it’s what people expected of her anyway, so why not?  Maybe her mum is disappointed, but she shouldn’t be. Everything is fine.  F. I. N. E.

It’s clear that’s not really what’s going on here, however.  Charly isn’t fine.  Lady Dealer is a study in the difference between the image we create and the reality we live.  And Charly is as disconnected as her power.  When the electricity is cut, her phones go flat, and the calls stop coming in, she’s confronted with herself. And it’s not a comfortable place to be.  

A Woman on the Verge of a Breakdown

The language of Lady Dealer is witty and playful.  Charly is full of bravado, until she isn’t.  She rhymes, pulls out big words: slowly reveals the potential she reached before she began to isolate herself.  Her self-loathing and insecurity, rehashing mistakes from her youth, will cut close to the bone for some viewers.  As might the sense that, when the buzz of work and social media and music is stripped away, what remains might… well, not be all it’s cracked up to be.

So Lady Dealer is a simple work: a (mostly) monologue, a simple set (Jasmine Araujo, based on a concept by Blythe Brett) of looming electrical devices, an atmospheric soundscape by Anna Short, complementary lighting by Bethany Gupwell.  Davies plays a woman on the edge of a breakdown with sometimes frightening realism.  She jokes around with us until it’s not funny any more: our role as audience is part confessional, a way to keep her brain busy so she doesn’t focus on the tough things.  A monologue which follows someone who is unravelling is not something I haven’t seen before, but Lady Dealer has a deft touch and a great performance from Davies. The ending perhaps left me wanting a little more, but I look forward to the next projects from the cast and creative team involved.

Salterton Arts Review’s rating: 3/5

Lady Dealer on until 15 June 2024.  More info and tickets here.