Cocaine, electronica and glamour: This is not your average World War I drama

Dope Girls
★★★★
Stan*

The combination of the words “BBC” and “World War One drama” conjure very specific images – most of which you will not see in this new series set in Soho’s burgeoning underground club scene just after the war’s end. You can forget about Music Hall tunes as well; Dope Girls’ atmospheric score is composed by London experimental music collective NYX, and also features songs from period-incorrect artists including Missy Higgins, MEUTE and The Mystery Lights.

Created and written by playwright Polly Stenham and Alex Warren, this is not your standard period piece, which is evident – and gorgeous – from the outset.

Julianne Nicholson as Kate, who opens a nightclub in Soho in 1918 in Dope Girls.Credit: Kevin Baker/Bad Wolf/Sony Pictures Television

It’s 1918, the war has just ended, and many of the country’s women are fizzing with excitement at seeing their men return. Not Kate (Mare of Eastown’s Julianne Nicholson) though; working in a shop while her husband is at war, she’s disappointed to have not received a telegram bearing bad news from the front. She’s not thrilled at the prospect of returning to mere housewife status, either.

But when her husband James (Steven Elder) does turn up, it’s only for one night before he takes his own life. Then Kate and daughter Evie (Eilidh Fisher) are promptly evicted from their home; James had secretly been in debt.

Homeless and broke, they turn up on the doorstep of Billie (Umi Myers), apparently “an old friend” of Kate’s, asking for a bed for a night or two.

Umi Myers (left) as Billie and Julianne Nicholson as Kate.

Billie lives in Soho, and as Armistice Day approaches, central London is in party mode – although for her, every night is a party; she works at one of the city’s many illegal nightclubs as a dancer, hanging out with bohemian actors and musicians. Desperate to make some cash, Kate helps out at the club. But things escalate quickly when it’s raided by the police, who are cracking down on vice now that cocaine has been made illegal.

After Kate tries to nick the club manager’s money and dope, she and Billie find themselves targeted by both the police and the Saluccis, the local crime family headed by matriarch Isabella (Geraldine James) and her sons Damaso (Slow Horses′ Dustin Demri-Burns) and Luca (Rory Fleck-Byrne).

Undeterred, Kate sees the potential to make money, and decides to set up her own club, cajoling Billie and her friends to join her venture.

Alongside this storyline, we meet Violet (Australian Eliza Scanlen), a young woman among the country’s first female police officers, tasked with helping to infiltrate clubland.

Violet is asked to work undercover as a dancer by her dodgy boss Sergeant Turner (Ian Bonar). She’d rather be helping the “kind of women” in such places, she tells him, rather than exploiting them, but her ambition overrides any sense of sisterhood – at least at first.

There are many threads in the six episodes – Evie gets caught up with a spiritualist, there’s the Spanish flu pandemic, forbidden gay love and the horrors of war – not all of which are satisfyingly explored, but Dope Girls isn’t diminished by its ambition.

Its playful, stylised vision of 1918 Soho (filmed largely in Wales), coupled with on-screen graphics and the occasional, subtle breaking of the fourth wall, will likely annoy purists (despite the disclaimer that “this drama is inspired by a forgotten time in history”), but the big-budget production design, the talented, female-led cast and a cracking story make for a fabulously fun combination of seediness and glamour.

*Nine is the owner of Stan and this masthead.

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