(Four stars)

Half a decade ago, Irish theatre was leading the world in its vision of a 21st-century economy based more on gangsterism and brutality than on peace and democracy. It was as if the very speed of Ireland’s transition from a folksy, convivial traditional culture to a post-modern “tiger” economy had shocked the nation into a special relationship with a process taking place, at different rates, in every country on the planet. Five years on, Irish plays tracking this mean-streets-of-Dublin territory seem more familiar, and just a shade repetitive. But work like Stella Feehily’s Duck – premiering at the Traverse in a co-production from Out of Joint and the Royal Court – still packs a terrific dramatic punch, particularly in a production as brilliantly paced and perfectly cast as this one, from that master of the 1990s street-life genre, Max Stafford-Clark.

Feehily’s variation on the theme focuses on the brutal commodification and exploitation of women implicit in this new gangster economy, but also on new possibilities of escape opening up for young Irish women. The show’s central character is Catherine, known to everyone else as Cat and to her bullying club-owner boyfriend Mark as “Duck”, because of her big feet.

Beautiful, fragile-looking and only 19 years old, Cat begins to rebel after a bad afternoon hanging around waiting for Mark while he does a bit of drug-dealing on a slum housing estate. Later that night, she drunkenly blows up his precious new Jeep with the aid of a cardigan and a lighter, provoking a crisis in which – with her loyal student friend Sophie by her side – she faces up to the temptation of selling herself to a rich elderly writer who frequents Mark’s club, to the fact that there’s no going back to the emotional waste-land of her parents’ home, and to the truth that Mark’s kind of possessive, obsessive “love” is no use to her at all.

And, of course, there’s nothing much new in all of this, apart from the terrifying vividness with which Feehily portrays the abject failure of both Cat’s family and Sophie’s, each outwardly respectable Dublin household a nightmare of middle-aged bitterness and hysteria, low-level domestic violence and half-concealed marital breakdown. But the sheer life-enhancing energy of the writing, the brilliant lucidity and pace of the production and – above all – a clutch of superb performances from a six-strong cast led by the wonderful Ruth Negga as Cat, with Karl Shiels as Mark and Elaine Symons as Sophie, make this an exhilarating piece of theatre; and one that plunges through scenes of terrific menace and violence – and a brief burst of vaguely exploitative nudity – towards a convincingly optimistic ending.

'Of the shows in... Traverse Two, Stella Feehily's Duck is an immensely engaging and vibrant slice of young female Dublin life, taking in dodgy clubs, literary begrudgery, family claustrophobia and a perennial desire to find a place and a role for oneself... Feehily will become a first-rate writer'

A YOUNG woman can still be addressed as “duck” as a term of affection. She might also be called duck because she takes to water, like the protagonist of Stella Feehily’s play, who lolls naked in the bath, first with her spivvish boyfriend, then with the ageing novelist who has picked her up in the bar where she’s a waitress.

But Ruth Negga’s Cat gets the nickname “duck” from the first of these men because he thinks she has big feet. The insult is typical of the Dublin she inhabits, a place Feehily defines in terms of booze, dope, violence, family tensions and, of course, sexism.

The director is Max Stafford-Clark, whose Royal Court regime had a nose for socially aware plays, and whose current company, Out of Joint, has followed suit. And there’s much here to remind one of the late Andrea Dunbar, whose tough, realistic plays were staged by both. Feehily, too, is a raw writer who writes about young women discovering themselves, though in the Irish rather than the Yorkshire urban jungle.

Duck, at the Traverse, isn’t Out of Joint’s richest play, but it carries a punch from the start. It’s late at night. Negga’s Cat runs on stage drunk. She’s saved from rape by a girlfriend with a broken bottle, but still faces trouble because she’s just torched a jeep belonging to her drug-dealer lover, Karl Shiels’s Mark. By the end she’s learnt that “duck” also means “dodge”, or evade blows, and that “ducking” is something historically suffered by uppity women.

But Feehily is also punning on Cat’s real name. She seems wild but longs to be tame, or at least to find someone who loves her. But her mother is rejecting, her father vaguely incestuous, Tony Rohr as the elderly writer emotionally untrustworthy, and Shiels’s Mark sleazy and coarse. Yet you can’t dismiss Duck as one of those victim plays that were so fashionable 20 years ago. There’s too much brio in the acting, plus a toughness in the writing that bodes well for Feehily’s future.

Stella Feehily's Duck is a bright, sharp, funny first play about a drifting teenager in Dublin. It emerges in Max Stafford-Clark's Out of Joint production as a well-cooked slice of life...

Feehily's heroine is a young woman who attracts people like a magnet without quite knowing who she is herself. It's a measure of her shifting identity that everyone addresses her by a different name. Her shady, nightclub-owning boyfriend, Mark, patronisingly dubs her Duck because of her big feet. To Jack, a 60-ish Irish novelist with whom she embarks on a diversionary affair, she becomes Gina Lollobrigida. And to her friend Sophie, she is simply Cat, implying an enviable streetwise smartness.

As a portrait of teenage female insecurity, the play is entirely believable. I was particularly struck by Feehily's tact in suggesting that Sophie has a profound crush on Cat that stops just short of physical desire. And Feehily juxtaposes scenes from her heroine's romantic life with great wit: one minute we see her sharing a bath with her gently besotted lover, the next with her brutish boyfriend...

Much of the pleasure lies in the brisk urgency of Stafford-Clark's production and the honesty of the acting. Ruth Negga's Cat is like a teenage version of Wedekind's Lulu, on whom everyone imprints their own desires. Elaine Symons as her aggressively adoring student chum, Tony Rohr as the infatuated novelist and Karl Shiels as the drug-pushing boyfriend all show, with great vividness, their individual re-creation of the heroine. Feehily is very good on the pains of youth...

Duck hurls its audience into the heart of ladette culture with a car explosion offstage, quickly followed by two very drunk teenage girls entering in hyper-short mini-skirts, tottering on their heels with shock at the act of vandalism one of them has committed.

Seconds later, two boys turn up and attempt rape - only to discover their role changing from predators to victims as one of the girls smashes her bottle of Bacardi Breezer, and turns it into a lethal weapon.

Stella Feehily's first full length play is, without doubt, an adrenaline rush, a hyperventilating hymn to the age of the angry young woman. Yet while it breathtakingly conveys the sense of lives led in restless escape from smothering boredom, it has to be asked whether it is as much a journey of discovery as it is an emotional rollercoaster ride.

To conclude that despite being galvanising, this play is not particularly revelatory, does not deny the brimming raw promise of Feehily's quick-fire dialogue and her flint-sharp and often fiercely comic characterisation. Director Max Stafford-Clark has lit the trail for two explosive performances from Ruth Negga as Cat ( nicknamed Duck for her large feet), and Elaine Symons as her best-friend Sophie, and the way they use sex and education respectively to escape their parents' world of conversationless marriage and depressing employment prospects.

The most intriguing plot point is Cat's decision to break her relationship with a thuggish boyfriend by having an affair with a writer in his sixties, whose opportunist predatoriness is thinly disguised by his urbanity and love of literature.

It raises serious questions about how a bright, uneducated girl can truly escape a restrictive background - perhaps something to be developed even further in Feehily's next play.

(Four stars)

STELLA FEEHILY'S FIRST play starts with a bang. Two teenage girls, completely drunk, collapse on to the stage.

Cat has just burnt down her boyfriend's Jeep by stuffing her cardigan into the petrol tank and setting it alight and is semi-hysterical.

Two passing boys try to molest them; Sophie responds with a broken bottle of Bacardi Breezer and gets punched in the face for her pains. They stumble home as the sun is coming up. Just another normal night out, then.

Feehily's play, set in modern Ireland, gradually builds up and fleshes out the lives of Sophie and Cat in a string of scenes largely exploring their relationships with other people. Sophie has a disastrous one with her mother, who channels her own unhappiness into verbally abusing her daughter.

Sophie deals with her own via a minor Benylin addiction and an understated propensity for self harm. Meanwhile, Cat lives with Mark, entrepreneurial owner of a club where she also works (her Catholic parents think it's entirely a platonic relationship). Mark loves Cat but also treats her like a dog.

Max Stafford Clark's sleek, televisual production imposes pace and vitality on a play that in the hands of a lesser director could risk losing its focus. Yet Feehily's drama is admirable for never forcing itself down the throat of its audience.

Her narrative and characterisation is allusive rather than imposing; one of the best scenes is the only one to feature Cat's father (Tony Rohr). He has bought his daughter her favourite salad cream on hearing she was coming home.

In a few short clean strokes, another strand is quietly added to Feehily's widescreen composition of lonely, unhappy lives.

The production is propelled by some magnificent performances, in particular from Ruth Negga as Cat, who inhabits all the rage and neediness of a young girl unsure of what she wants. For Feehily's emotionally damaged people, love is nearly always a form of violence - or perhaps it's the other way round.

(Four stars)

It’s fertile ground for fiction and drama, that volatile period of life when teenagers outgrow adolescence. Fertile enough to have it’s own genre – the coming-of-age tale.

The young Irish actress-turned-writer Stella Feehily delves into this territory with her debut play Duck, about two spirited girls fizzling with the restlessness of impending adulthood. For Sophie (Elaine Symons) the frustration manifests itself in eating disorders and fisticuffs with her mother.

Ruth Negga’s Cat is more intrepid, experimenting with her undeniable sexual allure. Unknown to her parents, she’s cohabiting with a drug-dealer. But she’s weary of his bullying machismo: the play begins when she drunkenly torches his jeep. Later, she takes up with his polar opposite: an author who is old enough to be her father – indeed he’s played by the same actor, Tony Rohr.

Directed by Max Stafford-Clark for his own Out of Joint company, Duck is noisy, sexy, funny and violent. Feehily writes with confidence and an acute ear for dialogue...