YES SO I SAID YES Opens at the Finborough Theatre Next Month

The Great Britain premiere of award-winning playwright David Ireland's Yes So I Said Yes opens at the Finborough Theatre for a four week limited season on Tuesday, 23 November 2021.

Ulster Loyalist Alan Black is kept awake every night by his neighbour McCorrick's dog barking. To add to his difficulties, McCorrick refuses to acknowledge that he even owns a dog, let alone one that is creating a disturbance.

In a Northern Ireland he barely recognises, where politics has proved just to be the continuation of war by other means, a disconsolate Alan sets out to rid himself of the incessant noise.

As he seeks help from authority figures, he finally - as a very last resort - turns to the only voice he can really trust, Eammon Holmes...

Coinciding with the100th anniversary of the partition of Ireland and the foundation of Northern Ireland, Yes So I Said Yes is a blackly comic, ferocious, dystopian satire about what it's like to feel alone in a place where everyone else is conspiring to erase you and your history.

As an intimate theatre venue, we are taking extra precautions to ensure the safety of performers, staff, and audience members during the current pandemic. We have reduced our audience capacity to 80% and temporarily increased our ticket prices to reflect this. Due to the size of our auditorium, we will ask audiences to wear a face covering throughout their visit including during the performance. We will also be asking audience members to provide the following evidence on arrival at the venue of either double vaccination, negative test results, or a recent infection. We will be reviewing these protocols every month and will lift them as soon as it is safe to do so. For full information, please see our website.

As a special event on Wednesday, 1 December, there will be a Q&A session after the performance of Yes So I Said Yes which will take place in the theatre auditorium. It will feature playwright David Ireland via Zoom, director Max Elton and cast members. The event will be moderated by Sue Healy, Literary Manager of the Finborough Theatre. Performance + Q&A tickets must be purchased together for this special performance and will be £30 (£28 concessions) for the performance and Q&A.

Playwright David Ireland, the multi award-winning author of Cyprus Avenue, returns to the Finborough Theatre following the critically acclaimed English premiere of Everything Between Us; and director Max Elton returns to the Finborough Theatre following his "excellent production" (The Guardian) of Israel Zangwill's play The Melting Pot.

Playwright David Ireland was born in Belfast and brought up in County Down. He was Playwright-in-Residence at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast, in 2011-2012. In 2010, Everything Between Us, first produced by Solas Nua and Tinderbox Theatre Company, was performed in Belfast, Scotland and Washington, D.C., winning the Stewart Parker Trust BBC Radio Drama Award and the Meyer-Whitworth Award for Best New Play. It received its English premiere at the Finborough Theatre in 2017. Yes So I Said Yes was first performed at the Crescent Arts Centre, Belfast, in 2011 as part of the Belfast Festival and then on a tour of Northern Ireland, where its performances in Omagh led to the theatre being picketed by a local church group. Cyprus Avenue premiered at The Royal Court Theatre before transferring to The Public Theater, New York City, The Abbey Theatre, Dublin, and the Metropolitan Arts Centre, Belfast, winning The Irish Times Theatre Award for Best New Play, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Drama. It returned to The Royal Court Theatre in 2019. It received over 100,000 views online. In 2018, Ireland's Ulster American was performed by the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, as part of their Edinburgh Festival season, where it was awarded the Carol Tambor Best of Edinburgh Award, and won Best Female Performance, Best New Play and Best Production at the Critics' Awards for Theatre in Scotland.

Director Max Elton directed the critically acclaimed production of David Ireland's The End of Hope in Soho Theatre's main space in a co-production between Soho Theatre and Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond. He wrote and directed Big Brother Blitzkrieg (King's Head Theatre), and other direction includes The Melting Pot (Finborough Theatre), Stripped (King's Head Theatre) and Leftovers (Tristan Bates Theatre).

Book online at www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk.

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