Katie seems a nice girl. She's taking her A-levels; she plays clarinet in the school orchestra; her parents read the Guardian. She is thinking about university. Her black boyfriend, Abe, is a bit older than her, in his mid-20s, and when Abe meets her from school one afternoon after orchestra practice, an ice-cream knocked from his hand by a passing young Asian lad on his bike initiates a descent into the underbelly of Luton – a grim, faceless place of racial and geographical demarcations – and into the dark heart of Katie's existence.
We've had plenty of such theatrical low-life odysseys before, but the most intriguing thing about Jack Thorne's sharply written monologue is that it is a young, white woman who is at its centre. Katie, in Rosie Wyatt's wonderful performance, is a mixture of bravado and fear, blowjobs and self-loathing. She is glimpsed at one point in a souped-up car without her knickers just because a bullying bloke told her to take her underwear off. "You're too easy," he sneers, and you can feel Katie die another little death inside as she tucks her breasts back inside her school shirt.
The most telling moments is a brief encounter between Katie and the Asian boy in his bedroom. He's got a place at Oxford; she's scraped an offer for Essex. He's getting out, just as Katie is going under. Katie's not one for showing she cares, but you know that inside she's bleeding. The question is whether she'll ever wake from her stupor to notice.
