The Rules

Sandra prides herself in living by ‘The Rules’, a list of homespun principles she’s worked out for herself. As she sits in her dingy apartment with her baby daughter asleep in the next room and waits for Shay, her guy to come home from the late night convenience store she talks about her dreams and her often-violent past and assures us …‘If you stick to the rules you can’t go wrong’. But as the night wears on and Shay does not appear we begin to realise.. her future holds a tragic secret.

The Rules was performed in Dublin, Ireland as a diptych with a longer piece called ‘Billy The Boat Loves Angelina’ which is set eighteen months previously in Christmas week. It follows Sandra and her brother Tim’s odyssey through the underworld of Dun Laoghaire town to extract their sister Susan from her drug dealer boyfriend and bring her home for Christmas.