Writer: Azaelia Slade
Director: Jess Gough
Azaelia Slade’s deftly characterised one-woman dramedy This Is How I Got Arrested… After Smuggling Drugs Across The Border, But Never Actually Getting Caught With Any Drugs, promises to reveal how Sophie, the damaged, drug-addled protagonist, finds herself detained on holiday.
We do not, at least on the night of this review, get the promised answer. This is because, at the opening, Sophie asks an audience member to set a strict 75-minute phone timer so she will not miss her flight home (she is seemingly being deported). Once the timer is up, the piece ends, reveal or no reveal. This might threaten narrative frustration: a shaggy-dog story without the benefit of a punchline. In fact, so strong is Sophie’s characterisation that an ending does not particularly matter. We know enough about the dark places she is likely to end up that a finale is superfluous.
Dancing manically around purple tinsel, dressed in a seemingly endless series of garish pink costume changes, 20-something Sophie thinks she is a kind of adult Barbie girl. In fact, the glittery Barbie world she thinks she inhabits contrasts with a tawdry reality. The audience can see, even if Sophie does not, that she is trapped in a cycle of despair defined by crushingly poor self-esteem and stupefyingly large quantities of emotion-numbing narcotics.
As a nine-year-old, Sophie dreams of getting “Polly Pocket Princess Pumps” for her toy doll and being one of the coolest girls in school. Her bleach-blond Mum, “beer in hand, fag at the ready”, disabuses her of that idea: “You’re not pretty enough to be a princess”, she tells her sorrowful daughter, who is soon excluded from school.
Sophie’s dad (an abusive small-time bully) sells drugs to rich neighbours from the family home on a North London council estate. Dad invites Sophie’s elder brother, Jamie, into the family business early on, but thinks his daughter is too “soft” to join them, even though she does her first line of cocaine at the age of 13. Childhoods rarely get much more starved of love than this.
At 18, a sex-fuelled holiday to Tenerife ends in disaster. A year or two later, she is running drugs in a Greek holiday resort for a dealer called Ricky (“skin like a Wotsit-coloured raisin”) who gives her a black eye for her trouble. She meets an Irish couple who, a year later, invite her to join them in smuggling drugs from Ireland to Spain. “What’s the worst thing that could happen?” she muses. The journey involves no sleep for 36 hours, epic drug-taking, which she accurately describes as being “on a mad one”, and a mind-boggling episode of air rage.
Slade’s unflinching, nuanced depiction of the deeply damaged, deluded protagonist is both heart-rending and instantly recognisable. Anticipate audience interaction throughout, as Sophie makes us, quite literally, accomplices in the slow-motion, cherry-hued car crash that is her life. Well-judged humour adds welcome light and shade.
Reviewed on 23 March 2026
