Alexa Davies in Lady Dealer at Bush Theatre (Photo by Harry Elletson)
For Charly, every day is the same: neck some coffee, answer the phone, sell some drugs. The flat she once shared with her ex, Clo, is now the base of her growing business. And she’s fine with that. She’s fine! Charly is fine.
But when a power cut hits her estate and the burner phone stops buzzing she is forced to question exactly how fine she is. Desperate to escape the swell of feeling bubbling beneath the surface, Charly charges head first into a world of knockoff Morrisseys, disapproving mothers, and the ghosts of girlfriends past.
Lady Dealer is the ‘pummelling, poetic and profound’ (The Stage) ★★★★★ play starring Alexa Davies (Dead Pixels, Mamma Mia 2: Here We Go Again), directed by Evening Standard Future Theatre Award winner Emily Aboud (SPLINTERED).
★★★★★ ‘Fast, frenetic and utterly charming’ The List
★★★★ ‘A searing and heartbreaking performance’ The Scotsman
Playbill: Pick Of The Fringe
SHORTLISTED BBC Writer’s Room Popcorn Award 2023
SHORTLISTED Holden Street Theatres’ Edinburgh Fringe Award 2023
SHORTLISTED Filipa Bragança Award 2023
SHORTLISTED Verity Bargate Award 2022
Looking for show information and content guidance?
Lady Dealer Self-Care Guide and Content Warnings
Anna trained at LAMDA. Credits as Sound Designer include Lady Dealer (Roundabout at Summerhall), Pansexual Pregnant Piracy (Soho Theatre), The Beautiful Future is Coming (Jermyn Street Theatre), The Last One (Arcola Theatre), The Wizard of Oz (Watermill Theatre), Spy for Spy (Riverside Studios), Primary Shakespeare: As You Like It (Orange Tree Theatre), Crackers (Polka Theatre), Ravenscourt (Hampstead Theatre), I Know I Know I Know (Southwark Playhouse), The Straw Chair (Finborough Theatre). As Associate Sound Designer: My Son’s a Queer (But What Can You Do?) (Turbine Theatre), Folk (Hampstead Theatre), Lesbian Space Crime (Soho Theatre).
Recent work includes: The Earthworks (Young Vic), This Much I Know, To Have and To Hold (Hampstead Theatre), A Play For The Living In A Time Of Extinction, Lay Down Your Burdens (Barbican), La Voix Humaine (Opéra National du Rhin), A Rice, Little Baby Jesus (Orange Tree), Wickies, When Darkness Falls (Park 200), Here, The Woods (Southwark Playhouse), Talking Heads (Watford Palace), You Heard Me, Trade (UK Tour), Brown Girls Do It Too: Mama Told Me Not To Come, Fitter, Wonder Winterland (Soho Theatre), War & Culture, Little Scratch, Keep Watching (New Diorama), Ignition (Frantic Assembly), The Pirate, The Princess and the Platypus (Polka), The Last Harvest (National Youth Theatre.
Nominated for Best Lighting Design Offies for This Much I Know (Hampstead Theatre) 2023, A-Typical Rainbow (Turbine Theatre) 2022, Queen of the Mist (Charing Cross Theatre) 2019.
Emily Aboud is a Trinidadian theatre director. She was shortlisted for the RTST Peter Hall Award in 2023 and shortlisted for the JMK Award in 2022 and 2021. She is a recipient of the Evening Standard Future Theatre Award. Recent credits include: Lady Dealer (Bush, Paines Plough Roundabout); Rock DJ and Three Other Songs That Saved The World (New Diorama); Haemosporidian (Lyric Hammersmith); Flip! (Soho Theatre and regional tour), SPLINTERED (Soho Theatre Mainhouse, also writer), Close Quarters (LAMDA), Salt Slow (RCSSD), BOGEYMAN (Edinburgh Fringe 2022, also writer), Pink Lemonade (Bush Theatre) and Chatham House Rules (Pleasance Theatre). As a Caribbean theatre maker, her work draws inspiration from the political community theatre she grew up making in Trinidad – a combination of music, movement, direct audience address and theatricality.
Grace Dickson Productions (GDP) is a bold new production company, developing and producing formally innovative & bitingly relevant new writing that champions marginalised voices. GDP works collaboratively with artists on professional development as well as producing work that isn’t afraid to make a noise and ruffle some feathers. GDP produces theatre that represents the world we live in and the worlds beyond it; work that is imaginative, playful and boundary-breaking.
Previous collaborations include Rhum + Clay, The REcreate Agency, Park Theatre, Bric A Brac, Freight Theatre, Ransack Theatre & Silent Faces, at venues such as Park Theatre, New Diorama, Soho Theatre, Southwark Playhouse, Roundhouse and on tour.
GDP encompasses the work of Grace Dickson, a Newcastle-born producer with a keen eye for powerful, socially relevant new writing. Grace works across the industry in roles including Associate Producer at Francesca Moody Productions (for whom she line produced Feeling Afraid As If Something Terrible Is Going To Happen at the Bush Theatre and Tim Crouch’s An Oak Tree internationally), Company Producer for Lagahoo Productions and These Girls, Accounts Assistant/Bookkeeper at Runaway Entertainment & co-founder of HD General Management with Ameena Hamid. Her recent work is supported by the Stage One Bursary for New Producers.
Credits include: The Long Run (New Diorama), Lady Dealer (Roundabout), SPLINTERED (Soho Theatre), Project Dictator (New Diorama), Move Fast and Break Things (Summerhall, Edinburgh Fringe), BOGEYMAN (Pleasance Edinburgh Fringe) and Belly Up (Turbine Theatre).
Producer: Grace Dickson
Assistant Producer: Rory Thomas Howes
Jasmine is a performance designer based in London working across theatre, dance, installation, and film. Her design credits include Rapunzel (Theatre Peckham), The Shoemaker (WNO), An End to A Beginning, and The Walk with Amal. Prop design credits include Beneatha’s Place (Young Vic). Jasmine graduated from her BA at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in 2022 where she was awarded the Principal’s Award for Drama.
Jasmine’s design for Lady Dealer is based on the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe production design by Blythe Brett.
Martha Watson Allpress is an award winning, working-class writer from the East Midlands.
Her debut play, Patricia Gets Ready (for a date with the man that used to hit her), received 5 star reviews (The Guardian, The Stage, Broadway World) and her second, Kick, won the Bill Cashmore Award and was staged for a limited run at the Lyric Hammersmith. In 2023 her newest piece, Lady Dealer, premiered to critical acclaim in Paines Plough’s Roundabout. Also in 2023, Martha was announced as the winner for Ambassador Theatre Groups Playwrights Prize for her script, Ask Her If She Still Keeps All Her Kings in the Back Row. She is currently under commission to Nottingham Playhouse.
She has been shortlisted, and longlisted, for a number of awards and programmes, including the Verity Bargate Award, the Women’s Prize for Playwrighting, Blacklight’s 4Stories and the BBC Script Academy. She was also a supported writer under HighTide’s Lighthouse scheme and Hampstead Theatre’s INSPIRE programme.
As a screenwriter Martha is currently adapting Patricia with Various Artists Ltd and developing an original series, Off Centre, with Red Planet Pictures
Nikita Bala is a London-based freelance stage and production manager with a passion for all things technical. She has enjoyed collaborating on silly, clown-y shows, buzzing through festivals, and touring across the country doing what she loves.
Past credits include: Nowhere (Fuel); Bangers (Cardboard Citizens); Lady Dealer (Grace Dickson Productions); Godot is a Woman (Silent Faces) and; The Wolf, the Duck, and the Mouse (Unicorn).
