THE STORY: Three women in Belfast dream of escaping the political peril that marks their lives, but cannot because of the family loyalties instilled in them and their complicated relationships with men. Frieda is a would-be singer whose pro-IRA father disowns her, sending her into the arms of a Workers’ Party organizer and anti-IRA zealot. Her sister Josie is in love with an IRA leader, but ends up carrying the child of another man. And Donna, who waits five years for her lover to emerge from prison and finds that the overbearing and unfaithful man wasn’t worth the wait.
“Superlative…Devlin’s writing is only incidentally concerned with politics…what embeds itself most forcibly in the imagination is the clarity and depth with which she charts simpler, harder and more abiding frustrations and miseries. Devlin writes with extraordinary acuteness about life’s ability to dismay and confound us, and her three women are brooding and solitary figures, fully alive only in their imaginations, trapped by private yearnings which they cannot account for rationally.” —The Times (London).
“Most Irish plays tell us it is the women who suffer; this one shows it.” —The Guardian (UK).
