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. However, I longed for the writer to push herself a bit harder - to be a bit less touchy-Feehily and to tell us more about Dublin itself.
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.
However, the play's emotional reality is never matched by a similar geographical specificity. Although we get glimpses of seedy nightclubs and plush apartments, I never felt that Dublin became a vital character in the story of Cat's search for identity.
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; all I crave in her next play is a richer portrait of the surrounding society.
· Until August 23. Box office: 0131-228 1404. Then touring.
