The dual meaning of the title of this debut play by actress Kathryn O’Reilly is blunt. It’s not an explicitly political piece, but in its glimpse of broken families and boozed-up sex to break out of bleak lives, it’s about a fucked society.
O’Reilly has a great ear for the scrappy rhythm of everyday speech. She captures the clink and the clank of the complicated friendship between Luce and Charlene, who ride through their factory jobs on hangovers before popping poppers and hitting the bars.
Their world is all about the next fix, from their colleague Paulo, who scrapes by on two jobs and dreams of opening a supermarket in Russia, to Doris, Luce’s trans mother, who offers sex tips on YouTube. Luce and Charlene shout defiantly about who they are as women, while floundering over it.
For every character, it’s about escaping from where (and who) they are, or have been – but alone. Wider society is never seen, just beseeched over the phone or in court. Eloise Joseph is bullying and broken as Luce, but charismatic, while Samantha Robinson’s Charlene is knotted with frustration.
Their chemistry drives Sarah Meadows’ pared-back production. They sharpen the knife’s edge of a friendship caught between need and resentment. When the play is too on-the-nose, when Doris and Paulo slip into cyphers, they keep Luce and Charlene real.
‘Screwed’ fragments and loses momentum. And – counterbalanced by only the occasional allusion to her childhood – it jars slightly to have Paulo, a man, be Charlene’s voice of reason. But this is an assured debut, at times sharply observed and bruisingly funny – and free of tidy endings.