- he hadn't forgotten i was there - he just didn't care whether i was there or not - it would've been better him forgetting rather than not caring at all

Gerry and Iggy face the ends of their lives in a London hostel. As they drift from present concerns - the funeral of an old drinking partner, the relative sizes of their swollen livers, tube routes, street names, God and the lure of Belfast - to remembering ghosts from long ago, we catch a poignant glimpse of what might have been.

Owen McCafferty's The Absence of Women, heartrending and darkly comic in turn, premiered at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast, in February 2010.