A father and his handicapped daughter share a small bed in a cramped room. The father, in a broken monologue, talks about his rise from mere packer to furniture salesman - and his fall. The daughter, for better or for worse, tries to fill the silences, and we gradually learn why the two characters have ended up here.

Bedbound, by Enda Walsh, is a play which gasps for breath, suffocated as well as suffocating. Observed by the audience, two characters, a father and his polio-wracked daughter, each at one end of a small bed trapped between four plasterboard walls, try and hold at bay the silence which oppresses them and feeds their claustrophobia. The script is phrased in disjointed sentences, as if the characters were hyperventilating from panic, always on the brink of suffocation. Rather than speaking in one breath, father and daughter instead give the impression that they share the same respiratory system. This prevents one from speaking at the same time as the other, but means the other has to jump in as soon as there is a silence, as if to avoid asphyxiation.
The audience is quickly caught up in this headlong flight, in which monologues by father and daughter alternate and jumble together, ultimately revealing the sequence of events which has brought them to this room and this bed, until, if not genuine communication, at least a certain kind of understanding has been established, a preliminary condition for the pardoning of past wrongs.