Can't Forget About You

Description

Twenty-five year-old east Belfast man Stevie meets forty-nine year-old Glaswegian widow Martha while recovering from a painful breakup with his ex-girlfriend. Stevie and Martha are immediately attracted to each other. Although their relationship is based entirely upon sexual attraction, they find themselves falling in love. This challenges the expectations of Stevie's conservative Christian mother and his ultra-Unionist, Ulster-Scots-speaking sister who work hard to break the pair up. Stevie and Martha must decide if their relationship has a real future and if they can both overcome the pain of their heartbroken pasts. While primarily a hilarious comedy, Can't Forget About You touches on deeper themes such as grief, loss, sexual mores, cultural identity, sectarianism, generation, and the question of how Northern Ireland moves on from the politics of the past and faces the future.

David Ireland is one of Northern Ireland's hottest young writing talents. He is the former Playwright-in-Residence at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast (from May 2011), the winner of the BBC Radio Drama Award and the prestigious Meyer Whitworth Award, 2011, for Best New Play by an Emerging Writer for Everything Between Us (Tinderbox Theatre Company/Solas Nua). Other plays include What the Animals Say (Oran Mor/Lyric, Belfast), Arguments for Terrorism (Oran Mor), The End of Hope The End of Desire (Oran Mor), Half A Glass of Water (Abbey Theatre) and Yes, So I Said Yes (Ransom Productions).

It is cleverly structured through a combination of fresh wit, sharp observational comedy and subtly nuanced characterisations. * Stage * both light and bold, not to say at times highly emotional. . . . hilarious, direct, and sometimes unsettling . . . beneath the surface, the old religious narrative lives on, into new times. * Scotsman * David Ireland's romantic comedy . . . contains more than its fair share of pleasant surprises. . . . More refreshing, however, is the warmth the playwright brings to a genre that can often get mired in sourness and cynicism * The Times * if there's a taboo, Ireland is all too willing to break it. . . . he successfully laces a shallow boy-meets-girl narrative with a sharp insight into the generational conflicts of a post-Troubles Northern Ireland. It's rude, ribald and . . . raucously funny. . . . there's plenty of great observational comedy along the way. * Guardian *