Deborah Frances-White’s first play has the verve of her avidly followed podcast, The Guilty Feminist. Its money-sex-privilege plot is knotty. Lines are flung to the audience like raw meat: should we look on an unwelcome act of cunnilingus as simply a bad down-there moment, a bit like having a smear test? Yet at the end of an evening in which most arguments get a drubbing, a truly sympathetic plea emerges: for solidarity without tribalism.
In Emma Butler’s speedy production, Never Have I Ever is cleverly set up as a drama in which four characters might be expected to leap to their identity stations: black, brown, white, bi, straight, wealthy, hard-up. Equally cleverly, the distinctions are both emphasised and entangled. Old friends meet in a restaurant, run by one couple, financially backed by another – who are about to learn they have lost their money. Yet after drinking, table-dancing and dares, a long-ago secret explodes and another, more dynamically dangerous transaction is proposed. This one involves sex.
