All Sally, a successful actress wants on returning home to Goatstown from a long European tour is to see her husband Charlie again. So when he says he's leaving her, she makes him go at once. Perhaps, she wonders later, she is too hard to live with. As a child growing up in Dublin, she never had friends, thanks to her lonely, secretive unmarried mother who kept her at home with her. On stage she can effortlessly mimic others, but who is she, herself? With desperate courage she decides to visit her grandfather, a shadowy figure, in the forlorn hope that he can unlock the door to her past.