JO IS a victim of domestic violence. She never knows what will set her husband off but she cannot escape the cyclical beatings she endures.
Next door, Jason can't stop listening through the wall. He's addicted to the noises, wracked with guilt as he imagines the horrible violent dance playing out beyond the wallpaper.
Another neighbour, Amelia, wants nothing to do with it. Her job as a lowly cleaner symbolises her ineffectual efforts to scrub Jo's battered existence out of her life. She has taken to sleeping on the downstairs couch in an attempt to prevent Jo's life seeping through the upstairs wall. Indisputably a victim, Jo wields a defiant power over Jason and Amelia.
Written in 2003, this was British playwright Debbie Tucker Green's first play. It has been labelled ''in-yer-face'' theatre, similar in tone and subject to Sarah Kane's brutally honest works. But Tucker Green's language style is different: poetic, punchy and dotted with humour within its grim subject matter. The first two-thirds of Dirty Butterfly are set in an indefinite place, a transitory world where the three characters squabble like long-time adversaries despite apparently never having met.
Despite the humiliating violence that frames her days, Jo defiantly taunts her neighbours about their collusion in her fractured life. Inaction, it is suggested, is acceptance. Tucker Green's language here is fast and real, a rhythm of broken sentences that knit together as an urban patois.
In the play's last section the action shifts to the cafe where Amelia works. The sight of a beaten and bloodied Jo turning up as Amelia mops the floor is haunting and harrowing. Jo, seemingly narrating the end of her life, is both desperate and detached. Amelia, worn down by life and Jo's repeated appearances, can only offer limited refuge as blood drips on her sparkling, just-cleaned floor.
Zoe Houghton, Dorian Nkono and Sara Zwangobani develop Jo, Jason and Amelia with precision and depth. On Teresa Negroponte's effectively economical set, Wayne Blair directs his cast and weaves Tucker Green's words into a taut, well-nurtured and absorbing production.