Rudi is a loner with a secret, a tramp, who in his youth was once a promising scholar in love with and mesmerised by ‘the sumptuous, voluptuous Isabel’. But everything was spoilt and fell apart and in despair he considered ending his life but for something he once read, that “it is nobler and finer to be felled by life than by one’s own hand”. And so for decades, restless and homeless, he goes through the motions until, one day, a young friend, Rebecca, attempts to prise from him the story of his life. Danny Morrison, long an admirer of Hermann Hesse (the quote above is from „Steppenwolf“), first came across Hesse’s „Three Tales from the Life of Knulp“ while he was serving an eight-year prison sentence. He has now adapted and transferred this powerful and moving story to twentieth-century Ireland.
