The world he has created is London at its seediest. Melling’s nameless 19 year-old ‘Boy’ may wear a London 2012 rucksack but it is dirtied and torn, a reflection of his position in life as a part of a gang of pedlar boys, owned and pimped out by the unscrupulous Bossman to sell any old tat door to door in the city. We meet him as he wakes up to the aftermath of a heavy night, trying to reconstruct what has happened and finding that the only way to do that is to delve as deep as he can into his memory, unearthing harsh realities and difficult truths.
peddling is fantastically, almost unbearably intense, and something remarkably thrilling to watch. Contained within a gauze-covered, detritus-filled box around which we all sit (Lily Arnold’s design, Azusa Ono’s brilliant lighting), Melling prowls and pants and prances and peddles in a breath-taking performance. The inarticulacy of this abandoned boy is expressed in an almost poetic style, jagged phrases, shards of memory, flashes of real insight all come and go as the events of the past few days are related, filling in the gaps of a most tragic personal history.