Bad Luck Charlie is one of those rare plays that is intensely individual but also intimately relatable, and nothing comes across more clearly when I watch Georgia Vyvyan and Ben Galvin rehearse Mariam Abdel-Razek’s writing debut in the basement of the Corpus Playroom. After spending an hour listening to the writer enthuse, or ‘ramble’, for which she frequently apologises, about her first full-length theatrical work, I am desperate to see for myself how the script will be realised on the stage, but it is not long before I see her faith in the directors (Joy Gingell and Saad Siddiqui) and duo of actors is more than justified.

The play is a two-hander, centring on two exes. Charlie (Galvin) is convinced he suffers from chronic bad luck, and before the events of the first scene he has been dumped and lost a childhood friend to a car accident in quick succession. As the play progresses, we see him interact with his ex-girlfriend Alex (Vyvyan), as the pair negotiate different kinds of loss, the complexities of relationships and being young. Mariam explains to me that we won’t just see them interact as exes, however, as the play comprises two narratives, one going forward in time, and the other backward. This means that we see Charlie and Alex fall in love in sharp juxtaposition with the dysfunction of their relationship after their breakup. Although Mariam says flashbacks can be cheap when used lazily, she also loves narratives that go backwards, which come with built-in hindsight and nostalgia. She cites two musicals as her inspiration for this format: Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along and the 2001 dual narrative The Last Five Years, and tells me that taking a story backwards can reveal something about relationships that a chronological approach couldn’t, saying “You have to go into their pasts because they don’t have a future.”

"Bad Luck Charlie is not just feelings on a page, but the result of work and refinement."

The narrative structure allows the play to have moments of levity alongside heavier scenes. When I ask Mariam about her inspiration and writing process, she tells me about her experience as a Footlight and the life events that contributed to Bad Luck Charlie. “As I was first conceiving of Charlie,” she says, “I was going through a break-up, and then another over the summer while I was writing.” She describes Bad Luck Charlie as the most honest piece she has ever written; while writing the first draft, a childhood friend passed away suddenly, and she tells me, “We hadn’t been in touch for a few years, but it changed everything.” Charlie’s grief is a heightened version of her own feelings, but most importantly a fictionalised one. Bad Luck Charlie is not just feelings on a page, but the result of work and refinement, a process that has continued after the initial pitch and well into the rehearsal process. Georgia and Ben tell me how exciting it has been to work on a piece of new writing when dialogue can be reworked to better suit their voices and acting styles.

When I speak to Saad, Georgia and Ben, they have a lot to say about the comedy and emotional weight of the script, but also really help me to see how the writing will transfer to the stage. Mariam had told me that the entire team “got it,” and it is clear that the audience will too. The naturalism of the dialogue has been difficult to render, but the trio describes to me the versatility of Joy’s vision for the set, which will be highly stylised to evoke a wide variety of locations and time frames. I tell them how much I enjoyed reading a draft of the script, and Georgia immediately tells me that with this kind of script it is often hard to see how it will work on stage, but “it does though, it just works.”

No wonder – the director and actors have thought through the end of every interrupted sentence. Their performances are centred around the idea of walking the line between cliché and depth. Indeed, although in some respects the play has the air of a romantic comedy, the play cannot stray into cliché when both its characters are so undeniably real. Bad Luck Charlie is a play that shows two individuals deal with the universal themes of love and grief in a personal, specific way. Even though the show is still a week away, Ben knocks on the door to the rehearsal room and enters the scene, on the stage, there are only Alex, Charlie, and his bad luck.

Bad Luck Charlie is on at the Corpus Playroom from Tuesday 19th to Saturday 23rd February at 7 pm.