'There's such a love there' - Eva O'Connor on how uni friendships inspired her Fringe show For Dolores

She smiles. “Because I’m a performer as well, it’s quite hard to sit in the audience and watch your own work. If you’re on stage, at least your inner critic is a bit switched off. I feel very close to it because I’ve worked on it so much, but now I’m starting to find the joy.”

The 36-year-old from Co. Clare, who has been staging work at the Fringe since she was 19, describes the fact that For Dolores has its UK premiere at the Traverse this month as a “career highlight”. “To be in that programme with Zinnie Harris and Cora Bissett and Bryony Kimmings, I feel very lucky.”

For Dolores is the story of a friendship between two young women, one Irish, one Scottish, who meet as students at Edinburgh University. We catch up with Réaltín and Mo a couple of years later as they unpick the events that drove them apart and the new circumstances which might just bring them back together.

“I really feel that you have these friendships in university that are as intense as romantic relationships. You go out together, you’re hungover together, then you go to the library together. Your lives are so enmeshed and there’s such a love there. Also it’s really unsustainable in the real world, but you don’t realise it at the time. I was interested in that chemistry, the pull between friends, the blurred lines.”

The two-hander, directed by Jim Culleton of Irish new-writing company Fishamble, is brought to life by two young actors, Lara McDonnell (who played the title role in Matilda on the West End and acted in Jez Butterworth’s The Hills of California) and Scottish actor Catriona Faint (Katherine in James V: Katherine; Jonathan Harker in Dracula: Mina’s Reckoning). “There was talk of casting someone Irish as Mo, but I said, ‘We’re are not taking this play to Scotland with an Irish actor playing a Scottish accent,’” O’Connor laughs.

“Honestly, I can’t imagine the play without Cat now. They are just electric on stage, there is this dynamic between them which I feel like I wrote but I know I didn’t. It was exactly what I wanted from the play, that these people are so different but there is this irresistible click between them. It just feels like a little bit of magic.”

In many ways, For Dolores is a very Edinburgh story, exploring the gulf between the two students: Réaltín (middle-class, entitled) and Mo (working-class, politicised). “When I arrived in Edinburgh, I didn’t know anything about Britain. I was really surprised by was how few Scottish people I met at university.

“Réaltín actually says to Mo, ‘Ireland is too new a nation to have a class system’, and Mo slags her off, quite justifiably. I had no real awareness of politics and I met lots of people who had really progressive, radical views and who educated me a lot. It really shaped who I feel I am now, politically. I wanted to put that in the play.”

O’Connor started making theatre almost as soon as she arrived in Edinburgh and put on her first Fringe show, Clinical Lies, in 2010 when she was 19. “It was mostly a monologue, but my friends would wander in and out in cameo roles as moral support. Then one of my friends went to the Highlands for the day with her boyfriend and didn’t make it back in time, and the next night I cut all the other parts and it turned into a one-person show. That will give you an idea of the level of professionalism! But I loved it so much.”

Between 2010 and 2020, she didn’t miss a Fringe and the festival became the springboard for the work she made with Sunday’s Child, the Dublin-based theatre company she founded with director Hildegard Ryan. Her impressive back catalogue includes plays such as Maz and Bricks, which deals with abortion and toured Ireland in the run up to the Repeal the 8th referendum, and Overshadowed, which she adapted as a short-form series for BBC Three, and which won the Mind Media Award for Best Drama.

“I learned so much at the Fringe. I feel so lucky that I was able to make so many mistakes and try things out. From Edinburgh, I started doing the Dublin Fringe, then there would be Irish touring dates, and from there we started touring internationally. I got my agent in Edinburgh, and I got into writing for TV. Every year I took something to Edinburgh it feels like something good came out of it.”

However, she is troubled by how expensive it has become to take new work to the Fringe. “We were able to stay in our student flat through August, so there would be about 12 of us in a two-bedroom flat. Now, people ask me, how can you bring a show to Edinburgh on a shoestring? What will the Fringe look like if everyone has to be rich to be there? I find that quite depressing.”

She was already something of a Fringe veteran when she won a Fringe First Award in 2019 for Mustard, a solo performance about a woman reeling from a break-up who lathers herself in the condiment. By the end of the run, her skin had turned yellow.

“It felt like a huge moment because Mustard was very much made in Hilde’s sitting room, a slightly weird play, a real labour of love. We felt like we were taking some risks creatively and it really paid off. When you’ve put so many years into going to the Fringe, to win a Fringe First was so special.”

Chicken, co-written with Ryan, in which O’Connor plays a celebrity actor and addict who happens to be a chicken, played for two years at the Fringe and won the Filipa Bragança Award for a solo female-identifying performer in 2023 before touring to Italy, Australia and Canada.

O’Connor grins. “I remember saying to Hilde before we went on, ‘this could be a terrible creative decision, to be a chicken’. But it has been an unexpected, slightly bizarre gem of a play that has taken us all around the world.”

For Dolores, Traverse Theatre, various times until 30 August, www.traverse.co.uk

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