"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

 

ln 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.