Wild young Dubliners

The raw energy of Stella Feehily's first play doesn't always make up for its flaws.

It's about a wild Dublin teenager nicknamed Duck who has firebombed her boyfriend's jeep and is threatening to lure her best mate away from her studies into a selfdestructive underworld of boys and parties. But then Duck takes up with a has-been old novelist and finally incurs the fury of her boyfriend, who is an insecure and vicious thug.

Feehily's play presents a gallery of wild young Dubliners getting hammered and duelling with parents, but the play fails to create much light from the considerable heat that it generates on stage. So, although it's a rites of passage drama about a young woman growing out of abusive relationships, it's not clear why such a sassy kid stays with her vicious boyfriend or gets seduced by a pickled old writer.

Still, Max Stafford-Clark's production gleefully binges on the story's feral energies and from moment to moment makes an engaging and troubling spectacle.

You may feel that Feehily's play is simply off on a bender to nowhere, but Ruth Negga (pictured with Tony Rohrin) is mesmerising as the heroine Duck, who does anything but waddle around like a bird. Instead, she mixes an explosive cocktail of recklessness and vulnerability.

Duck