Meanwhile, another woman is trying to save a former student, who is heavily pregnant, from a violent backstreet abortion to be performed by her thuggish lesbian lover.

And all of this is narrated in rhyme.

Mark O'Rowe's play is an audacious, virtuoso piece of writing. It is very entertaining, blackly comic, at times gripping, consistently impressive. It makes O'Rowe pretty much the most exciting contemporary Irish playwright. But his ambition is partially self-defeating: the sheer scope of his stylistic and imaginative ambition serves to eclipse the dramatic tension of the piece. Amidst such adventures and invention, the drama dissipates. In his story's epic sweep, dramatic momentum is sometimes sacrificed to the energy of violent adventure . . . as in Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill.

But O'Rowe has humanistic ambitions also. For all its adventure, at least two of the three characters are credible people whose personal tragedies are affecting, as the spare poetry of this line given to the young woman suggests: "The drill for several years/ has been bed alone, then tears."

Eileen Walsh plays the young woman who falls from the crane and for the flying wormery. She is superb. Of the three performers, she is most successful in asserting herself over O'Rowe's text . . . she makes it her own, and the rhyme becomes an expression of her character, rather than a conceit imposed upon her. Andrea Irvine as the other woman and Aidan Kelly as the psycho are both very good.

The story is told in successive monologues by the three characters, standing on separate platforms. They are dimly lit against a black background marked only by large shards of mirror, intended to convey some sense of limbo-like afterlife. Designed by Jon Bausor and lit by Philip Gladwell, the set is understated but precise and effective.

Many will hate this play, or simply stay away, because of the grotesque violence (which climaxes in a literally spectacular disembowellment). O'Rowe's literary ambition is not matched by a theatrical one, and some will find the prospect of 105 minutes watching three near-immobile characters talking at the audience to be dull. Both are valid objections. But there is a brazen talent at work here, with a delirious indifference to theatrical convention and tradition. And that, for me, is a damn good reason to go.