Duck ( Archived )

Reviews

Pictured (L to R): Elaine Symons, Ruth Negga, Karl Shiels, Tony Rohr.

Photography by John Haynes

Review quotes from Duck’s performances at the Traverse Theatre Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2003

“Duck hurls its audience into the heart of ladette culture… without doubt, an adrenaline rush, a hyperventilating hymn to the age of the angry women.”

“an emotional rollercoaster ride”

Rachel Halliburton Evening Standard

“It carries a punch from the start… a brio in the acting, and a toughness on the writing.” Benedict Nightingale The Times

“A bright, sharp, funny first play” Michael Billington The Guardian

“Packs a terrific dramatic punch… brilliantly paced and perfectly cast.”

“An exhilarating piece of theatre… the sheer life-enhancing energy of the writing.”

“A clutch of superb performances… led by the wonderful Ruth Negga.”

Joyce McMillan The Scotsman

_“Spunky performances from Ruth Negga and Elaine Symons… a most dynamic duo who take on all comers” _The Herald

“Stella Feehily’s delightful debut… written with a freshness and attention to domestic details.”

“This is a sharp-eyed, keen-eared piece of writing, sassily served by Max Stafford-Clark”

Dominic Cavendish The Daily Telegraph

“Immensely engaging and vibrant slice of young female Dublin life.”

“Feehily will be a first-rate writer.”

Ian Shuttleworth The Financial Times

“Max Stafford-Clark sleek, televisual production imposes pace and vitality”

_“Magnificent performances, in particular Ruth Negga” _

Clair Allfree The Metro

In Stella Feehily’s Duck, two Dublin wild girls in their late teens begin to grow up.

Director Max Stafford Clark, one of the Royal Court and now running his own Out of Joint company, was deservedly honoured at the Evening Standard Drama Awards for his career-long championship of new writing. He discovered yet more fresh talent with Stella Feehily’s first full-length play, Duck, a marvellously vivid account of a pair of female adolescents in Dublin, coping with ghastly families and dodgy lovers, with a wonderfully upfront and sexy performance from the beautiful Ruth Negga as the eponymous Duck. The three successive, and contrasting, scenes that find her naked in different bathrooms reveal that Feehily has a distinctively neat and arresting gift when it comes to advancing her dramatic narrative. I hope we will be hearing a good deal more of both writer and actress.

Charles Spencer, THE DAILY TELEGRAPH, 3 December 2003

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 jeep and is threatening to lure her best mate away from her studies into a self-destructive 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 is generates on stage. So, although it a rites of passage drama about a young woman growing out of abusive relationships, it not clear why such a sassy kid stays with her vicious boyfriend or gets seduced by a picked old writer.

Still, Max Stfford-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 vender to nowhere, but Ruth Negga 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.

p(=reviewer-name). Patrick Marmion, METRO, 1 December 2003

In Dublin fair city the girls may be pretty, but they are also according to Stella Feehily’s vivid first play smashed out of their heads much of the time. Duck focuses on two friends in their late teens, Cat (called “Duck” by her boyfriend on account of her large feet) and Sophie, and their behaviour is enough to send shivers down the spine of anyone with teenage daughters.

When we first meet Cat and Sophie they are very much the worse for wear as they try to run from the spot where one of them has just committed arson. As they scrabble about, they are attacked and nearly raped by a group of boys until Sophie threaten the youths with a shard of glass.

Feehily’s play (co-produced by the Royal Court and Out of Joint) is an alarming and painful account of the perils of growing up. Both girls have a miserable home life with a bitter, domineering mother, while Cat also has an unhealthy relationship with a bully of a boyfriend, who runs a wine bar and is tangled up in drugs crime. And while Sophie is shrewd enough to attend college, Cat is set on making money to a degree that might screw up her whole future.

It’s a play poised on the brink of disaster then, but it is also full of life and often very funny. The dialogue crackles and relationships are acutely observed, though the mother figures are rather caricatured.

Max Stafford-Clark, directing, brings out all the play energy, so that it lands fizzing on the stage like an unexploded missile, and the performances are first rate. Karl Shiels has a brooding danger about him as Cat’s boyfriend and Elaine Symons has a lovely openness as Sophie. Ruth Negga meanwhile is just beautiful as Cat as vivid, defensive and vulnerable as a kitten.

Sarah Hemming, FINANCIAL TIMES, 1 December 2003

Stella Feehily’s punchy first play is a study in female resilience. It shows young, drunk, scantily-clad Irish women coming up tough and smiling, as if shrugging off a hangover; from all sorts of disadvantages and abuse. Sure, it’s a bit schematic, but Feehily’s writing has a zest and swagger well-served by Max Stafford-Clark’s pacy production that carries it through.

Feehily’s heroine, played with a delightfully artless mixture of innocence and impudent lasciviousness by Ruth Negga, is a child of the modern, not-so-fair city of Dublin. She a staggeringly pretty club hostess who is also pretty staggeringly drunk when we first see her. She is called Cat, but nicknamed Duck by her drug-dealing boyfriend, Mark of account of her big feet.

In revenge for his brutishness, she torches his beloved Jeep and takes up with a writer Irish clichealert! who is old enough to be her father. Alas, he also treats her as a bland slate to be renamed and scribbled on.

Meanwhile, Cat’s college-going friend, Sophie, is fighting off would-be rapists of an evening, then facing her abusive mum in the morning. In her bid to show that life in modern, Euro-friendly Dublin is still tough, Feehily chucks in references to everything from paedophile priests to terrorism. She even lets a cloud of incest pass over the stage before letting it evaporate.

Even when she is steering close to bathos, though Feehily’s writing is dextrous and charming. “Fecund,” says Tony Rohr as the goatish old writer, as he cups Cat buttock. “Feck what?”: she replies. Duck is never less than very good fun. It is directed with economy by Max Stafford-Clark. Negga shines at the head of a winning cast. The play also containes one of the wittiest, sexiest, scariest bathtub scenes I’ve ever seen on stage. With luck, it won’t be the best thing Stella Feehily ever writes.

Nick Curtis, EVENING STANDARD, 28 November 2003

That volatile period of life when teenagers are outgrowing their adolescence has inspired numerous stories, including Stella Feehily’s first play, which paints a picture of bored, rebellious and deeply insecure late-teens growing up in Dublin. Its opening scene even suggests that this is more of a coming-of-rage drama.

We first see Cat and Sophie in their scanty glad-rags staggering binge-drunk on to the stage. Cat has just torched her boyfriend car after he nicknamed her “Duck” on account of her big feet. Two rape-minded lads are repelled with a broken bottle by her mate Sophie. The girls totter home on their high heels as dawn approaches. It has been, you suspect, just another average night on the town.

Duck then proceeds to expand our view of the lives of this partying pair.

Sophie, a student living at home, channels her frustrations through eating disorders and the shouting match that is the relationship with her mother. University is her hope of a better future.

Cat shares a flat with Mark, the drug-dealing manager of the tacky bar where she works. Uncertain who she wants to be, and with a whiff of incest hanging over her family home, she seeks comfort with an Irish novelist. He’s old enough to be her dad.

Tony Rohr, sporting a dignified calm that hides the writer’s mentoring ego, also plays Cat’s father in Max Stafford-Clark fast-paced production, in which the cast of six take on several roles as the play hops around the homes, bars and streets of Feehily’s Dublin. She has a great ear for zesty dialogue, a schematic but sometimes telling way of contrasting successive scenes (Cat naked in the bath with her literary lover, then with her menacing boyfriend, who nearly drowns her) and a wry sense of humour.

The play and the production, a collaboration between the touring company Out of Joint and the Royal Court, are excellent in capturing the sense of lives led in a rush to keep ahead of numbing boredom. But there’s little room to deepen our understanding of Feehily’s central, cynical dreamers and the premature maturity that has knocked them off balance.

Still, its all anchored by emotionally convincing performances, including Karl Shiels as Mark, who loves Cat amid his brutish machismo, and Elaine Symons as Sophie, nursing a crush on her best friend.

Most striking of all is Ruth Negga as Cat, a bundle of uncertainties expressed through anger and vulnerability. It’s a must-see turn among a very fine cast.

Feehily has delivered an impressive “this is the way it is” debut drama. Let hope her next play can be a “why it is” piece of writing as well.