The play begins a few years later, when they\u2019re in their mid-20s. Something has happened between them, something very dramatic, and they\u2019re trying to work out whether there is any way back. As they revisit the past, the audience pieces together what drove them apart.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe story of these two girls has been living rent-free in my brain for a really long time,\u201d O\u2019Connor says over the phone one morning from her home in London, where she lives with her toddler. \u201cI wanted to capture the hedonistic freedom of university but also the pain that comes with living in such close quarters and how people can treat each other.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was really fascinated by those friendships that you form in your early 20s that are so all-consuming. Before you\u2019re seeing other people, you have these really expansive days together. You go out and get drunk together, then you\u2019re hungover together, and they\u2019re your chosen family. <\/p>\n
\u201cYou don\u2019t really look ahead very much. You only start doing your later life planning after you\u2019ve left. There\u2019s this immediacy to that time, and I really wanted to see if I could capture it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The two protagonists, Mo and Re\u0301alti\u0301n, could hardly be more different. Mo, from Glasgow, arrives at university fiercely political and convinced that \u201ceveryone in Edinburgh is a posh c**t\u201d; R\u00e9alt\u00edn, from Dublin, is more naive. Their friendship is intimate, emotionally entangled and tinged with sexual tension, but it never quite becomes a romance.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m a woman writing about my own life experience and how I move through the world. That inevitably influences how I perceive things and how I write about them,\u201d O\u2019Connor says.<\/p>\n
That instinct runs through her work. Across her plays, she repeatedly returns to questions of girlhood, the body and the female experience. Her debut, Overshadowed, drew on her experience of anorexia. She wrote and performed the one-woman show, which won the Fishamble New Writing Award at Dublin Fringe Festival and marked the beginning of her long collaboration with the theatre company, including on For Dolores. <\/p>\n
She followed Overshadowed with Maz and Bricks<\/a>, which she wrote during the campaign to repeal the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution and centred on abortion rights and reproductive choice before creating Mustard<\/a>, a darkly comic solo show about self-harm, heartbreak and compulsion.<\/p>\n \u201cI had a real compulsion this time to write about female friendships and to try and nail that experience. Whenever something feels important in my life, I want to see if I can get it onto the page. <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s also the first time I\u2019ve written about motherhood. R\u00e9alt\u00edn has a very traumatic birth. I\u2019d started writing the play before I had my son, and then I had a horrendous birth myself. Afterwards I thought, well, now I\u2019m highly qualified to write that scene properly. It\u2019s strange how fiction can sometimes seem to predict your own life.\u201d<\/p>\n O\u2019Connor\u2019s background spans writing and performance. She wrote and starred in her first play, and for years created roles with herself in mind. At this stage in her career that\u2019s changing a little. Though she\u2019s still touring Chicken, she\u2019s getting more used to writing scripts she won\u2019t perform.<\/p>\n As she\u2019s now in her mid-30s, O\u2019Connor felt she was a decade too old to play either of the roles in For Dolores. Instead she has remained closely involved throughout rehearsals, working from London with the creative team as the play has evolved. <\/p>\n It\u2019s being directed by Jim Culleton, Fishamble\u2019s artistic director. He says O\u2019Connor has been open to cuts and responsive to discoveries made in the rehearsal room. When the team felt the final scene was missing a beat, she revisited the script and substantially reworked its structure. <\/p>\n \u201cShe knows what she wants to say, but she\u2019s also very collaborative and very open. And she\u2019s an actor herself, so she knows what that involves,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Culleton was taken by the script as soon as he read it. \u201cWhat struck me was how authentic it felt. The two characters are messy, flawed and imperfect, but you really care about them. You want them individually to work through their issues, but you also desperately want them to find a way back to each other. <\/p>\n \u201cEva captures that stage of your 20s so truthfully, when you\u2019re still figuring out your values, your friendships and who you are. It\u2019s also very funny. I found myself laughing and crying all the way through it.\u201d<\/p>\n Watching rehearsals in the final week, I\u2019m struck by the fact that Culleton is still laughing.<\/p>\n \u201cMaybe I\u2019m easily amused,\u201d he says. \u201cBut, no, I don\u2019t think so. It\u2019s a very rich play. Different things strike you as you go along. Often the saddest moments are the funniest, because humour is a way of coping. Eva is particularly good at creating that balance. You find yourself laughing one moment and then realising it\u2019s actually heartbreaking.\u201d<\/p>\n The production leans into theatricality rather than realism. In what is framed as a couples-therapy session, the audience becomes the therapist as the two women move fluidly between memories, direct address and choreographed movement. <\/p>\n Designed in collaboration with the choreographer N\u00f3ra N\u00ed Anluain Fay, the staging allows the characters to inhabit each other\u2019s memories and competing versions of the past. <\/p>\n [\u00a0Playwright Conor McPherson: \u2018You\u2019re better off getting hammered than a three-star review\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n The therapist\u2019s room is literally supported by the debris of their lives \u2013 Buckfast bottles, baby mobiles, milk warmers and university books \u2013 suggesting that the emotional work of the present rests on everything that came before.<\/p>\n For Culleton, however, the biggest challenge was casting. With only two performers, everything rests on the chemistry between Mo and R\u00e9alt\u00edn. <\/p>\n The search took months, with auditions held in Dublin for the Irish role and over Zoom for the Scottish role. Lara McDonnell, whose stage work includes collaborations with Sam Mendes, Kenneth Branagh and Jez Butterworth, was cast as R\u00e9alt\u00edn, while the Scottish actor Catriona Faint, a regular at the Traverse and other Scottish theatres, was chosen to play Mo.<\/p>\n \u201cYou need two actors who are individually brilliant but who also have an instinctive chemistry together,\u201d Culleton says. \u201cFortunately, Lara McDonnell and Catriona Faint have exactly that.\u201d<\/p>\n Remarkably, the pair never auditioned together. \u201cWe just felt they were both such strong, open performers that the chemistry would be there. When they met for the first time, at the photoshoot, it was as if they\u2019d known each other for years.\u201d<\/p>\n McDonnell and Faint say the chemistry was immediate.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen we did the first read-through, people kept asking how long we\u2019d known each other,\u201d Faint says. \u201cWe\u2019d literally met once before, at the photoshoot. But it just fit.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI feel like I\u2019ve known Cat for a thousand years,\u201d McDonnell says.<\/p>\n Much of the rehearsal process has involved building the characters\u2019 histories in minute detail. \u201cWe\u2019ve left no stone unturned,\u201d Faint says. \u201cWhen you know the characters inside out, you can play them freely. We trust each other enough to try things and surprise each other.\u201d<\/p>\n McDonnell agrees. \u201cWe\u2019ve had so much time to ask questions and suddenly realise, \u2018Oh my God, that\u2019s what this moment means.\u2019 Those conversations have been one of the nicest parts of the process.\u201d<\/p>\n The result is visible onstage. Even though the friendship is fractured from the opening moments, the audience never doubts why these women were once inseparable.<\/p>\n Both actors point to O\u2019Connor\u2019s writing as the reason the relationship feels so lived in. McDonnell singles out a line: \u201cA liability was our Deco. Beautiful people always are.\u201d Faint recalls a passage that struck her at her first audition, describing feelings being \u201cpressed into her ribcage, down into the space between her bladder and her pubic bone\u201d. \u201cI\u2019d never have found those words myself,\u201d she says. \u201cBut I immediately knew exactly what that feeling was. It\u2019s such vivid writing.\u201d<\/p>\n In rehearsals, a handful of touchstones kept resurfacing: Girls, Fleabag and Derry Girls. Like those three TV series, For Dolores treats female friendship not as a subplot but as the emotional centre of the story. It asks what happens when the most important relationship in your life begins to unravel, and why that loss can feel every bit as painful and bewildering as the end of a romance. <\/p>\n There may be no script for friendship breakups, but O\u2019Connor\u2019s play argues that they deserve to be taken just as seriously.<\/p>\n For Dolores, staged by Fishamble<\/a>, is at the Mick Lally Theatre, as part of Galway International Arts Festival<\/a>, from Thursday, July 16th, to Saturday, July 18th, with previews on Tuesday, July 14th, and Wednesday, July 15th. It\u2019s then at the Pavilion Theatre<\/a>, D\u00fan Laoghaire, Co Dublin, from Tuesday, July 22nd, until Sunday, July 26th; and the Traverse Theatre, in Edinburgh, as part of TravFest<\/a> and the Culture Ireland Showcase<\/a>, from Friday, August 7th, until Sunday, August 30th, with a preview on Thursday, August 6th<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hard as they are, we have a script for breakups. 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For Dolores: the play’s writer, Eva O’Connor. Photograph: Laine Alcantara <\/p>\n