It focuses on Thomas Dunne, loosely based on Barry's great-grandfather, the former chief superintendent of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, now (1932) confined to a psychiatric facility.

The play opens in a county home (an inpatient psychiatric facility) in Baltinglass, Ireland in 1932, some years after Irish independence.

These imagined visitations and reveries are interspersed by actual interactions between Dunne and two attendants from the county home, Mrs. O'Dea and Smith, who attempt to wash him and measure him for a new suit of clothes.

It consists largely of monologues from Dunne which serve to explain his past loyalties and decisions, before ending with the depiction of the traumatic event that started Dunne's downward spiral into madness: he brandished a sword at Annie and destroyed various pieces of furniture in her house after hearing of Michael Collins's death and the increased violence in the country due to the Irish Civil War.

The play concludes with Dunne recounting a story from his childhood about the family sheepdog killing and eating one of the sheep.