A woman has killed her husband with the kitchen knife ‘twice through the heart’ in the heat of the moment. He had abused her mentally and physically for many years. In court however, the woman does not talk about this, and she is given a long prison sentence. ‘I wanted to write a simple voice that was not poetic, literary or polemical. I wanted the voice to be so everyday it would be banal: the language to be flat and ordinary. I wanted to contrast the heightened drama of such domestic violence with plain, unpoetic speech. I was captivated with the idea that both the home and the prison were forms of incarceration for the battered wife. That there was no place she could be free. That the battered wife received a double sentence: the first from the husband and the second from the judge’. (Jackie Kay, ENO programme, 1997).