Meridian Theatre Company in Association with Granary

present

Knock 3 Times

8pm | September 10th – September 22nd

A New Comedy by Gaye Shortland

“My name is Victoria. Look, I am wearing the most modern type of crinoline – it is called “the cage of freedom”, so wonderfully light compared to those heavy layers of petticoats… I never leave this room. It is my prison. They, the ones I live with, even they do not know I exist. I dream of escape. But I lack the will. So I stay … and suffocate”
Stephen, The Victorian Recluse

In “Knock 3 Times”, Gaye Shortland, author of the hugely successful “Mind That ‘Tis My Brother”, has created a drama that is at once exotic and truly familiar. Stephen is a transvestite who combines his multiple inner lives as a bruised survivor of the swamp warfare of Vietnam and as the fragile (and elaborately costumed) heroine of an unwritten Victorian novel with the mundane reality of his life as a layabout in the family home. Will’s soul is in the Chicago ghetto, the world of drugs and guns and Tupac Rap and he does his best to live the life of a street fighting man while occasionally trying to finish his Leaving Cert. on the side. And Martha is a living saint, a yogic flyer, a nagging bitch, and a long-suffering victim i.e. an old-fashioned Irish Mammy, despite being only thirty-eight years of age.

A trio of oddballs, these ill-matched siblings share more than a taste for florid fantasies. Secrets, lies, guilt, twisted loyalties and grievous love forge bonds between them that may destroy them or may just give them enough strength to free themselves of their internal demons and their fear of each other and of the world at large.

Deeply moving, hugely comic “Knock 3 Times” is a must-see for all those who enjoy Gaye Shortland’s brand of unsentimental, heart-breaking humour.

in double bill with:

Love Peace And Robbery

By Liam Heylin

Gary is thirty-five and he has to be home for 9. Darren is twenty-one and he can’t show his face after 10.30. Then there’s the course to go to and the booze to be kept off and the cocaine not to be shoved up your nose and the promises to be kept to the wife, to the parole board, to the kids you’re hardly allowed to see and most crucially to yourself – that you’ll never, ever go back to your bad old ways which lead straight as a newly built motorway to the gates of Cork Prison.

Liam Heylin’s dark new comedy, a Post Office thriller on a Honda 50, is inspired by interviews with a group of men struggling to break the cycle of petty crime and imprisonment. It is a funny, touching portrait of the human face of the underworld.

His characters may be ‘dangerous to know’ but they’re also shrewd, witty survivors of a lifetime of self-abuse, still trying to go straight, sort of. They want to be good fathers, loving husbands, upright citizens, except, well the young fella has to have €380 for the school trip to Old Trafford on Saturday week and there’s a handy sub-post office just a few miles outa town … an sure what exactly are we waitin’ for…?

Both shows run nightly from September 10th – September 22nd with previews on September 6th 7th and 8th.

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