[5] It is scored for mezzo-soprano and 16 instrumentalists and sets an English-language libretto by the Scottish poet Jackie Kay based on her script for a television programme about a woman jailed for killing her violent husband.

Kay was concerned by inequalities in how the legal system treats men and women who kill their spouses and, in particular, in how the law on provocation in the United Kingdom was then interpreted, allowing a defence to murder only in the context of what happened immediately before a homicide and excluding the battered woman defence which considers the broader context which may have involved years of violent abuse.

[6] She chose to base the poems on a specific true case, that of Amelia Rossiter, a woman in her sixties who refused to give evidence in court about the years of violence from her husband that eventually led to her stabbing him twice through the heart with a kitchen knife.

[2] He had learnt of Kay's original work after he was shown a copy of the BBC video by poet and artistic director Maura Dooley.

)[7] However, the creators felt that their attempts at redeveloping and expanding the original work "water[ed] down its impact" and they eventually cut everything apart from the woman's words.

Inside (part 1) — The woman is in jail thinking of how she failed to take her lawyer's advice to give evidence about her husband's violence, because she did not want to be disloyal.

[1] The companion piece was the chamber opera The Country of the Blind which Turnage had composed relatively quickly in order to make up a full programme after Twice had turned out much shorter than originally intended.

[10] To Turnage's surprise, ENO decided to follow up the original four performances, split between Snape Maltings and the Queen Elizabeth Hall, with a staging at its main home in the London Coliseum.

In 1998, Twice received its North American premiere in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada and was also given in the United States, (by the New York Philharmonic,) Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands.

For this critic, the instrumental writing came over far more successfully than the vocal part with Kimberley praising the use of colour and finding the "draining" final climax particularly effective.

[24] David Gutman suggested in Gramophone that "if listeners feel uncomfortable with the mix of artful delivery and documentary realism, that may be part of the intended effect.

[25] John von Rhein of the Chicago Tribune noted the trickiness of the solo part and criticised the "banality" of Kay's verse but reported that he "was held by the sensitive lyrical, rather Bergian vocal writing and often translucent scoring".

"[3] Not all critics have been hostile to Kay's poetry: reviewing a concert by the London Sinfonietta, Nicholas Williams refers to her "arresting text".

In considering the original television version of Twice, the literary critic Laura Severin, praised the contrasted voices and the use of repetition as an adaptation to a medium where listeners would be less attentive to the words than if they were attending a conventional poetry reading.

She also saw Kay's portrayal of Rossiter as one that avoided both a conventional masculine representation of her as a ruthless murderer and an overly simplistic feminist one of her as a passive victim.