Meridian Theatre Company presents

ONE IS NOT A NUMBER

by Billy Roche

Granary Theatre Wednesday 21 – Saturday 31 October, 8pm nightly

*excluding Sun 25, Mon 26 Oct, Tue 27 & Wed 28 Oct
Booking: 021 490 4275

“I’d remove my foot from the water only to discover that it was whole again. And then I’d submerge my face and the same thing would happen… the fellow I’d become would be tall and fair and broad of shoulders and clean and good and kind.”

One Is Not A Number is a haunting love story about a girl called Imelda who has “a secretive smile, a husky laugh, a mirthless beauty, and a slightly cruel, defiant stare” and Matty Larkin, the outcast who adores her from afar. Set around Wexford Harbour, this intensely romantic but tough-minded tale of life-long loneliness and longing has all the trademark qualities of Billy Roche at his best. Celebrating love in all its complexity, coaxing epic drama out of mundane encounters, One Is Not A Number is full of the melancholy beauty and savage wit of The Cavalcaders and The Wexford Trilogy.

Performed by Gary Lydon (The Clinic, other credits etc), this lyrical monologue evokes the atmospheres of late 1960s Wexford when Tommy Day and The Bandits were singing “From The Candy Store On The Corner” and employment opportunities were limited to the bacon factory, the garage or the laundry.

The story is not one of our time and place and as Matty tries to make sense of Imelda’s part in his life, he realises that “she’s the one that makes you walk the Via Dolorosa, she’s the one who sends you to the water’s edge to look at yourself for the very first time. And some people call her this, and some people call her that and others call her something else… I happen to call her Imelda, and sometimes I call her Love.”

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