DIRTY BUTTERFLY. To 22 March.

London

DIRTY BUTTERFLY
by Debbie Tucker Green

Soho Theatre To 22 March 2003
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Sat 4pm
Audio-described: 20 March
BSL Signed: 19 March
Runs 1hr No interval

TICKETS: 020 7478 0100
Review: Timothy Ramsden 10 March

Image-based script and production offer rewards once audience has tuned in to their style.I hope Debbie Tucker Green will write more (she already has a play due at Hampstead). I wish she'd written a bit more here. What I thought was scene 2 in this brief play is, the script says, the Epilogue. If epilogues are supposed to offer resolution, this extensive scene barely completes the play's development.

The title holds an idea that lands softly in the mind, apparently paradoxical yet never taking full dramatic wing. The script's butterfly references don't flutter by; they coagulate the language, fixating speech in literary imagery.

Rufus Norris and designer Katrina Lindsay hardly help get to grips with the situation. Yet as the terse, intercut lines proceed, their visual style gathers force. Jason and Amelia lie separated at some distance by Jo: on a slanting, anonymously uncomfortable surface in restless, sleep-time postures. Jason and Amelia are separated by Jo, the woman next door whose nights are a fearful season of abuse. Here, more strongly, Green uses detail to establish circumstance: Jo seems terrified of waking her partner by a night-time visit to the lavatory.

As Jason becomes compulsively caught up in their neighbour's life, and early-shift café cleaner Amelia retires to the sofa for rest, Jo does come between them. Her suffering makes her savage, hurtfully retaliative for the abuse that's seeped through the thin-skinned walls and the secret life they have exposed.

This emerges anew in the Epilogue, as Jo invades Amelia's workplace, dirtying the just-cleaned floor with blood leaking down her legs, gushing out of her mouth. Both writing and production are more earth-bound and realistic here: as if the butterfly had pupated back into a caterpillar. But a bright caterpillar, with its fragmentary minimalism.

Mark Theodore does well as Jason, but the play's emotional balance swings around splendid performances by Jo McInnes, bullishly aggressive or defensively fraught, and Sharon Duncan-Brewster, making a more conventional role sing with individuality.

Once attuned to the poetic rhythm of Green's script and Rufus Norris's production, the piece becomes compelling. Interesting to see if this new playwright will spread her dramaturgical wings in future plays.

Amelia: Sharon Duncan-Brewster
Jo: Jo McInnes
Jason: Mark Theodore

Director: Rufus Norris
Designer: Katrina Lindsay
Lighting: Nigel Edwards
Sound: Paul Arditti
Assistant Director: Rachael Claire Lovett

2003-03-11 05:36:05