F**ked

Things aren’t going well for F. It’s New Year’s Day, she’s penniless and “coated in the greasy film of regret” following yet another sordid sexual encounter. Paltry tips from stripping barely cover the rent so she’s resorted to paying her coke dealer in sex instead. As she clears up the night’s debris F discovers a romance penned when she was a 12-year-old brimming with high expectations of love. It plunges her back into the past, forcing her to recall the significant mornings-after that marked her transition from virgin to whore.

Penelope Skinner’s debut one-woman play is a powerful study of cause and effect that explores the gulf between a young woman’s idealism and the dismal reality she is forced to accept. Hilariously cynical, shockingly frank and devastatingly vulnerable, F is a brilliantly crafted character whose painful experiences ring true. A superbly natural performance from Becci Gemmell draws the audience into F’s dysfunctional life to expose the self-loathing born of her accidental promiscuity.

Skinner’s script is exceptionally strong, peppered with wry observations and flashes of unexpected hilarity: taken aback by a lover’s readiness to use a condom, F remarks that he “doesn’t even want to put it in a bit first.” Such childishly simplistic descriptions of lewd experiences are masterstrokes that subtly reveal F’s endearing naivety and expose the abusive behaviour she has come to regard as normal. F’s life unfolds from the present backwards. Intrigue builds throughout the play as defining moments in F’s personal history are tantalisingly alluded to yet never fully elucidated until the very end.

An intimate documentary of a life in downward spiral, Fucked is a breathtaking example of gritty realism at its best.