Punk energy, nightclubs and no ‘Oi, guvnor’: The period drama shaking up the genre

To get some idea of what sort of show Dope Girls is, here’s Eliza Scanlen describing her favourite scene from filming: “Probably wiping period blood on Ian,” she says, deadpan. She’s talking about her character Violet’s response to a sexist police officer played by Ian Bonar. It’s a shocking, brilliant moment in a series full of them.

Dope Girls is a brazen period piece that brings a punk, Peaky Blinders-style sensibility to London’s Soho in 1918. A six-part drama, it follows Scanlen’s Violet Davies, one of the City of London Constabulary’s first ever female officers, as she is assigned to go undercover into the Soho underworld and investigate the disappearance of a gangster, reporting back to her superior – the very Sergeant Frank Turner on whom she wipes that blood.

Violet, Scanlen says, speaking in a London hotel just down the road from where Dope Girls is set, is “any actor’s dream”.

“What I like so much about this show is that the women make bad decisions all the time, and they’re all quite ruthless in their own way,” says the 26-year-old Australian actor. “For Violet, I like how ambitious she is and how headstrong she is. Once she has her heart set on something, she won’t let anyone get in her way, which I admire.”

Eliza Scanlen (middle) plays Violet Davies, a young police officer who goes undercover in London’s nightclubs in the drama Dope Girls.

As the show progresses Violet sets her heart on Kate Galloway (Julianne Nicholson), a born fighter and fledgling entrepreneur who opens a nightclub to support her daughters after her husband dies by suicide and leaves them bankrupt. Much like Disney’s A Thousand Blows, it’s a story of sisters doing it for themselves set in a time when we didn’t think they did. Put characters as forthright as Violet and Kate in to the postwar hedonistic frenzy of 1918, as a newly empowered generation of female gangs roamed the streets of Soho, throw in a burgeoning nightclub scene fuelled by moonshine and cocaine, and stand well back.

The show reunites Scanlen with Australian director Shannon Murphy, the pair having previously worked together on Murphy’s 2019 film Babyteeth.

“With Eliza, this was so different than making Babyteeth with her,” says Murphy. “The character couldn’t have been more different … which is why I wanted her to play it because I know she’s such an incredible chameleon.”

Murphy had directed English writer Polly Stenham’s play Tusk Tusk with the Sydney Theatre Company in 2010, so when the UK production house Bad Wolf (who also make HBO’s Industry as well as the award-winning I Hate Suzie) came to her with a Stenham script that was a loose adaptation of Marek Kohn’s 1992 book Dope Girls: The Birth of the British Drug Underground, she was intrigued.

Dope Girls shows how Soho’s nightclubs were once the centre of London’s underground drug scene.

“I never expected to see her [Stenham] write a period piece about the underground drug scene in Soho in 1918,” says Murphy. “And I’m not really someone who would jump at the chance to do period, but it felt so incredibly modern. I wanted it to feel as if the cameras have dropped in to that period so that you really felt the energy of the time and the spirit of wanting to bust out after such a dark and angry period.”

Murphy talks about the “punk energy” in Polly Stenham’s writing, and it’s that maverick spirit that propels Dope Girls from the first frame. Some of the scenes are jaw-dropping, from the casual sexism to the drug use, alongside the irresistible hedonism in the nightclubs that is so beautifully rendered. But at root, Dope Girls is still a historical drama as much as a hallucinatory one. You can’t help but watch and ask did that all actually happen? Did female police officers, for example, get sent in to nightclubs undercover like Scanlen’s Violet?

“Yes, that did actually happen,” says Scanlen. “So during the war, women were volunteers for the police, and when the war ended, they trialled women in the police force. What was so beneficial about employing women, they discovered, is that they could go undercover much more expertly and easily than men could, especially into nightclubs.”

There was also an understanding that persists to this day: that when the police were dealing with women on the streets or women using drugs, the best way forward was to get women to do it. It was just a practical thing.

Umi Myers (left) and Julianne Nicholson in Dope Girls.

“They didn’t employ women for idealistic purposes,” says Scanlen, laughing. “It was very much rooted in sexism. There are records of women who wrote about the women that they met whilst undercover, and the relationships they would start to build with the women that they met on the street.”

That said, you could never watch Dope Girls and think it was a documentary.

“I do really care about making things feel authentic, says Murphy, who has also directed Killing Eve and Rake. “But whether they precisely are or not is another matter. You know, I won’t pay attention to the level of detail of like, if a doorknob is the exact doorknob from 1918. My big rules on set were no one was to be covered in chimney soot, and no one could say, ‘Oi, guvnor’.”

Ben Mendelsohn, Eliza Scanlen, Shannon Murphy and Toby Wallace at the Babyteeth photocall at Venice Film Festival in 2019.Credit: Arthur Mola/Invision/AP

Adds Scanlen: “Often we make period drama feel like it’s so removed from where we are today, but people were not different to us. It’s not actually that long ago – they had a lot of attitude and they always thought that they were at the forefront. Everyone does.”

Murphy agrees. “When I look at the images, the black and white photos from that time, and especially the photos in the nightclubs of Paris and London, I think, ‘Oh my gosh, they look more progressive than how people are dressing up and going for it now.’ In fact, we’re in a more conservative time now, for sure.”

And TV is, too. Just as Scanlen wants to shock and challenge, in Murphy she has found a director who wants to do the same. It’s what TV needs right now, at a time when the big US streamers are prioritising surefire mediocrity ahead of risk taking and creativity.

“I tell everyone before they hire me,” says Murphy. “‘Don’t take me on if you just want to do middle of the road or what everybody else is doing.’ I’m not trying to say that I’m super original, but I am someone who will come in and want to rattle things a bit and sort of shake it up, because that’s what I love to watch.”

Dope Girls is now streaming on Stan, which is owned by Nine, the publisher of this masthead.

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