The trigger for a play can be many things: a moral dilemma or a political event, a true-life story or a misheard anecdote. Martha Watson Allpress has taken a less trodden path. The inspiration for her new play, Lady Dealer, came from her clashing taste in music.
This was during the pandemic when her playlist included Ezra Collective, a favourite from the local south London jazz scene. She loved their responsiveness and cool collaborative energy. At the same time, she was obsessed by the chaotic intensity of the Beastie Boys. She adored the meticulous collage of samples and beats created by the hip-hop pioneers, a sound she describes as “carnage”.
In the absence of gigs at that time, Watson Allpress yearned for the ensemble spirit of one and the direct attack of the other. “The dichotomy of those two feelings – chaos and calm, collaboration and isolation – manifested itself as a drug dealer having a power cut,” she says.
That drug dealer is Charly, a broken-hearted black-market seller whose routine – and sense of identity – are upturned when the electricity goes off and her phone battery dies. Can a dealer without a mobile be said to be a dealer at all?
“A drug dealer is on the fringe of the world but also central to it,” says Watson Allpress, who grew up in rural Lincolnshire and has worked as an actor since her teens. “Every person of my age in London has a drug dealer on their phone or knows a person that knows a person. So a dealer is entwined in nearly everyone’s lives, but not a part of them – you’re not going to get invited to the birthdays.”
Although Charly is a Beastie Boys fan, Lady Dealer is not about music. Nonetheless, the playwright’s love for the form seeps in. “It has a specific language and rhythm that is influenced by the music,” she says. “It fell out as a poem. Charly is reaching for an expression she can’t find, but in her head, this is the tempo, the intellect and the rhythm she has.”
Part of Paines Plough’s Edinburgh fringe season, Lady Dealer follows the playwright’s five-star debut Patricia Gets Ready (for a Date With the Man That Used to Hit Her), which turned heads at London’s Vault festival and again in the socially distanced Edinburgh fringe of 2021. What distinguished that play was its refusal to play the victim card. Yes, it was about a woman who had been assaulted by her partner, but it was also about someone who was a bit of a laugh. It did not hold back on the fury, nor was it all bleak.
“I get that it is a gut-punch of a show but I like that it is funny,” says the playwright. “That’s what we do: we go through really shit times then we have a laugh about it, because otherwise it’s just too dark and depressing. There has to be space for hope and joy.”
She is now developing a television version, building out from the monologue to embrace the family, friends and colleagues in Patricia’s life: “It’s like sending a child to school and saying, ‘Oh they’ve got friends!’ and seeing them blossom as a full person.”
She is pleased with its progress but careful not to be defined by it. “Patricia was based on a relationship I had when I was very young, but an element was sheer fiction,” she says about a play she started even before she enrolled at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama at the age of 23. “I felt scared of the conflation of me and the character. My fear was I was going to get lost and my story, which I’d taken time to find peace with, was out in the world and people were going to understand it differently.”
Sidestepping that dilemma, the new play is personal without being autobiographical. “Lady Dealer is a product of a lockdown brain,” she says. “It’s about loneliness and isolation – with jokes! Theatre that was created during the pandemic has a tenderness to it. I went through the wringer of being angry with the world, but you get so exhausted being angry that the radical thing, the real punk move, is to be relentlessly soft with yourself. I’m seeing so many characters now that have this tiny vulnerability, like a little bird. Charly in Lady Dealer doesn’t show that vulnerability easily but it’s there.”
In its study of a woman who mistakes self-destruction for self-preservation, it oscillates, in characteristic style, between the dramatic and the comic. “I love the idea that you come in and it’s the exact opposite of what you thought the play was going to be,” she says. “My instinct is always to look for the gag – a joke is a nice way to say to the audience: ‘We’re all safe in this space’ – and there are so many gags in a female drug dealer. It’s endless.”
At Roundabout, Summerhall, Edinburgh, 2–27 August