The playwright seems curiously detached about rape: The Breach, at Hampstead Theatre, reviewed

Hampstead’s latest play is a knotty rape drama by Naomi Wallace set in Kentucky. Four teenagers with weird names meet in a hired basement. Hoke and Frayne are boys. Jude is a girl whose younger brother, Acton, gets bullied at school. Their chat is aggressive, cynical and funny. Jude boasts that she’s already lost her virginity but she’s proud to have slept with just two men: ‘You’ve got to do six or seven to qualify for slut.’ Hoke claims to have groped his 34-year-old aunt when she was drunk, ‘but she never knew it happened so in a way it didn’t’. Great opening dialogue.

Wallace’s attitude to sexual assault is curiously detached. She seems to think rape is ‘just one of those things’

Then it all goes haywire. Hoke and Frayne plot to drug and rape Jude at her birthday party. Acton discovers the plan and reveals it to Jude. And what does she do? Well, she lets the rapists go ahead and rape her, of course, and she tells Acton to monitor the crime from the staircase.