Boundaries

Diane is walking her dog when she is verbally abused by a gang of young men in a passing car. Over the next weeks, they target her again and again. Her life turns into a hell of abuse, attacks and assault. Yet she has done nothing wrong. What would drive a gang of thugs to systematically ruin a woman’s life, for no good reason? Friendless, alone, battered and degraded, Diane is at the end of her rope. Then her neighbours rally. And Diane decides to fight back. She insists on her right to have her abuse taken seriously by the police, and gets the support of a good cop. Through weeks of interviews, dogged investigation, painstaking evidence gathering, they follow every lead, and track the assailants down to a final confrontation. The reasons for Diane’s hell become clear. Ultimately, she is forced to confront the things that have made her accept the abuse. The past. Who she was, and the person she has become. To address the side of herself she has always hidden, and accept it. To take what was on the margins of her world, and make it central. Without fear.

Boundaries is an unflinching account of a woman who has accepted abuse as normal, and assumed she deserved it. And it is a play about of a woman who has reached the point where she will take no more, and is fighting back with everything she’s got.

Part of our mini-season of Irish work