Camille, Lyric Hammersmith, London<br></br>Dirty Butterfly, Soho, London<br></br>Terrorism, Royal Court, London<br></br>Drummer Wanted, Barbican Pit, London

Death and a maiden ? another deep, dark tale from the City of Light

Once luxurious, Marguerite Gautier's Parisian apartment resembles a sepulchral storeroom. We're in a black, cavernous space scattered with pretty antiques – a gleaming piano, a dusty mirror. Ghostly figures file in to haunt each other and us with their memories. Directed by David McVicar, Camille is Neil Bartlett's fine new version of Alexandre Dumas' La Dame aux Camélias. Bartlett returns to the novel's narrative frame which got dropped in the author's hasty dramatisation of 1852. This means the story starts by looking forward to its tragic conclusions – in fact, just beyond the death from tuberculosis of Marguerite, the fallen prostitute who formerly dazzled high society.

So the deceased's apartment is doubling as an auction house, which is a pointed indication of how money dominates human interactions here. Marguerite's remaining property is, ironically, being hawked after her body has departed, the very body she tried to stop selling when she fell in love. Her fellow whores eye the goods and address us challengingly as potential customers. Then the heartbroken young hero, Armand, takes over as narrator and the past is replayed, recounting his paternally thwarted, all-consuming romance with Marguerite.

It's hard to believe that Daniela Nardini's sturdy Marguerite has consumption. It also seems incredible that Elliot Cowan's shy Armand doesn't flee aghast since she's such a flouncy brat at first. However, Cowan – a name to watch – is quietly superb: stubborn, jealous, naturally tender and (retrospectively) wracked with grief. I suppose the mannish look Nardini has – with cropped hair – also underlines Marguerite's peculiarly strong position as a independent-minded working woman at the outset. Her vulnerability is gradually revealed and her agonised death is, ultimately, intensely moving. Beverley Klein, as the conniving Prudence, just manages to avoid being a grotesque caricature. Though Armand's father is less narratively integrated than in Verdi's opera version, La Traviata, Paul Shelley manages to make him a dangerously mercurial gent here – humane, then crushingly arrogant and morally wrong.

Dirty Butterfly, by newcomer Debbie Tucker Green, is an even more harrowing portrait of a downtrodden woman. Jo, possibly a heroine addict like Nardini's Marguerite, bleeds to death after being abused by her brutal husband. Neighbour Jason (Mark Theodore) anxiously listens through the wall but is simultaneously getting a perverse kick out of it. On the other side, Amelia (Sharon Duncan-Brewster) is frighteningly hard-nosed or maybe deeply frightened. Neither step in to help.

Not only does this portrait of contemporary societal fragmentation touch a nerve, this writer's angle is extraordinary: you never see the abuse but you hear the inner monologues of Jo, Jason and Amelia. These are full of street slang but also lyrically fractured and overlapping. This is also expressionistically staged by Rufus Norris on a steeply sloping floor where the characters lie like pinned butterflies or sprawled murder victims.

Some might say this should be a radio play, and you can hear the literary influences, not least Samuel Beckett and Sarah Kane. But the writing is startlingly assured and risks a bold stylistic jolt. We shift, for one final scene, to a naturalistic encounter between Jo and Amelia. The understated horror of Jo McInnes's battered Jo drifting into the cafe where Amelia cleans – laughing weakly with blood drying on her bare legs – is devastating. I left this play feeling, emotionally, as if I'd been punched in the throat. Norris ought to be on Nicholas Hytner's team of young directors at the National and may Debbie Tucker Green's Born Bad – premiering next month at Hampstead – be as powerful as this.

Continuing the Royal Court's Focus Russian season, Terrorism gets off to a terrible start. Co-written by the young Presnyakov Brothers from the Urals and translated by Sasha Dugdale, scene one is set at a closed airport where armed soldiers say there's a bomb. The passengers' ensuing philosophising is wooden, meandering and strained. However, director Ramin Gray enlivens proceedings by having the audience corralled by the troops, and set changes are wittily choreographed to suggest that rolling beds and walls are taxiing aircraft.

The Presnyakovs cranky humour and storyline soon takes off as well. Little clues link disparate vignettes, leading to a case of vengeful domestic arson and possible political sabotage aboard a plane. On the serious side, a broad picture builds up of banal but potentially violent lives and of bullying being rife everywhere – at home, in the playground, at work, in the army locker room. The acting is uneven, with Ian Dunn's fraught businessman seeming particularly stiff. But Sarah Cattle is terrific as the fuming office frump and Paul Hilton is a hilariously dull adulterer, sniffing old socks in the wan hope of being aroused. Patchy but definitely promising.

Richard Maxwell's experimental two-hander Drummer Wanted – presented by New York City Players for BITE – is highly idiosyncratic as well. This is a domestic drama acted out in what looks like a bare rehearsal room. A wannabe-cool drummer called Frank, after a motorbike crash, is cared for by his mother who seems devoted, except her concerned endearments are all spoken in a rattling monotone. Maxwell has, surely, noticed the strange effect of actors doing a line-run (just checking they know the words). The supposed emotion of a speech is suddenly stripped away. Thus Ellen LeCompte as the sweet mum seems either a satirised cliché or a chilling fake. As Frank, Pete Simpson's deadpan delivery sends up adolescent dourness, while his sporadic yells and sudden slushy rock songs suggest he's suppressing an Oedipal complex. It's unsettling and bizarrely funny for a while, but this show – like Frank mooching around at home – outstays its welcome.

k.bassett@independent.co.uk

'Camille': Lyric Hammersmith, London W6 (020 8741 2311), to 12 April; 'Dirty Butterfly': Soho, London W1 (020 7478 0100), to Sat; 'Terrorism': Royal Court Upstairs, London SW1 (020 7565 5100), to 29 March; 'Drummer Wanted': Barbican Pit, London EC2 (020 7638 8891), to Sat