JP Miller's "Days of Wine and Roses"

"We were like movie stars - I used to imagine we didn't walk we glided - now all we do is stumble - it wasn't supposed to be like this"

In Belfast 1962 two young people meet at the airport on their way to start a new life in London. Excited, hopeful and slightly apprehensive, their spontaneous conversation leads to an eight-year relationship which evolves in the course of the play. Alcohol, however, assumes an increasingly dominant role in their lives, fragmenting their happiness and disintegrating their hopes. In this first, paradigmatic scene, Donal offers the hitherto teetotal Mona a sip of whiskey from his flask. When his back is turned, however, Mona surreptitiously takes another mouthful. Donal clearly introduces the increasingly tyrannical presence of drink into their lives but he is also more aware and in control than the naively impulsive and impressionable Mona. Beneath the intricate subtleties of their relationship, the ultimate truth is that Mona is corrupted by Donal before being abandoned to a lonely world of alcoholic dependence and degradation.

Donal and Mona leave Belfast for a new start in 60s London. Strangers in an unfamiliar city, they fall in love with life, each other, and the drink. An exciting whirlwind of discovery starts to spiral out of control as alcohol takes its grip. This is a tragic story of love through a haze of alcohol.