Her influences range from black writers such as Ntozake Shange and Louise Bennett to Bob Marley and Beverley Knight. What about Sarah Kane (to whom she has already been compared), another playwright who had the same visceral, no-holds-barred approach? “I know her work but the language is completely different,” she says. Like Kane, Tucker Green had to watch walk-outs from her debut. “If you hate the show, at least you have passion,” she shrugs. “Touch wood, you ain’t indifferent.” She says that one person even had a seizure in Dirty Butterfly.What draws her to extremes? “To start with, both plays are quite mundane Then they just get darker I’m interested in normal situations that become dark I find it intriguing; it’s all out there. Somebody who beats on his wife might be the nicest workmate you can have. In Born Bad, I was interested in betrayal, in women betraying women, which is the point of the play.” But the question at its heart is: what did mother know? “You sometimes hear in trials of abusers that the mother said she didn’t know.

And you ask yourself: ‘How come?’” In the text, there are also suggestions of the victim’s complicity. “There’s a whole heap of psychology going on and I’m not in a position to even go there The play is about subjective truth. Each character has a version of the truth that is real to them.”Born Bad is marketed as “a high-voltage drama in which two generations of one family confront the truth about their past.” Yes, it’s about abuse. But what distinguishes it from other plays about domestic misery is its structure.

Instead of being a realistic drama set in a squalid flat, it’s a series of fragmentary, free-floating poetic dialogues. The characters, who are onstage all the time, might just as easily be in purgatory as in a counselling session.It’s directed by Kathy Burke, who chose Born Bad out of a pile of new scripts sent to her by Hampstead Theatre “[It was] the most original,” she states “Debbie’s unique. She uses her own voice, and once I got into its rhythm, I just flew with it It really gripped me and a lot of it made me laugh out loud. I liked the cruelty – people venting what they really feel.” For Burke, the play is less about abuse than about “truth, denial and unconditional love”.And for Jenny Topper, Hampstead’s artistic director, Tucker Green is quite a find: “She has the three essential elements of a new voice: she is concerned with ideas, she is concerned with form, and she has the courage to stay true to her intuition and let her own linguistic invention come through.”Love it or loathe it, Tucker Green’s work is already making its mark.’Born Bad’: Hampstead, London NW3 (020 7722 9301), previewing, opens Friday, to 17 May. The term “new circus” was always pretty vague, but it’s even more so now it’s been around for 20 years. Everyone remembers the old circus, if only as a kind of Hovis folk memory that embraces elephants and sawdust along with milk in glass bottles and Green Shield stamps. New Circus, on the other hand, has always had a foreign accent.

Archaos, that more dangerous ground-breaker of the 1980s with its chainsaws and motorbikes, is French. And despite an explosion of copycat ventures and the advent of the UK’s first honours degree in circus, it is still the French-speaking nations that lead the field.But how much more innovation can circus take? Collectif AOC, based in the Champagne region, clearly believes there’s still juice in the barrel. Its British debut show, staged at the Barbican, blends juggling, trapeze and trampoline with live music and hip-hop dance to create a dream-like, spaced-out atmosphere more typical of pop video than circus ring.Over at the South Bank, meanwhile, Guinea’s Circus Baobab under the direction of French Archaos-creator Pierre Bidon injects a more frenetic dance-and-music element. Both shows attempt dramatic characterisation – the West Africans importing an entire gallery of local burlesque types – and both contain genuine novelties. Yet ultimately both fall prey to the same faults of dramatic focus, structure and timing – things that “old circus” had down to a T.The French group not only look ultra-cool in their butch sarongs and bondage gear but would like to be seen as Left Bank philosophers. Even the title of the show is a play on words: La Syncope du 7 – there are seven performers and the word “syncope” signifies a fainting fit as well as rhythmic syncopation.