Eva O'Connor - playwright, performer
The writer and actor on why she covers herself in condiments.
Afternoon…
…and apologies for sending out this issue slightly later than usual. I have been mega-busy this week working on a few other features, and prepping for the Edinburgh Fringe, among other things, and didn’t get a chance to put this together until today.
Anyway, welcome to the fifteenth issue of The Crush Bar, my fortnightly newsletter about theatre and the people that make it. If you haven’t subscribed yet, then please…
Below is the interview. This week it is with the Irish writer and actor Eva O’Connor, whose shows My Name Is Saoirse and Maz And Bricks were hits at the Edinburgh Fringe, and who is returning to the festival (digitally) with two more shows this August. We had a lovely chat over the phone last week - I was down in Suffolk, Eva was over in Limerick, performing in a play there.
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Right. Enough from me. On with the interview.
Interview: Eva O’Connor
In August 2019, Irish actor and writer Eva O’Connor’s skin turned yellow. Not because she had jaundice, or spent too long on a sunbed, but because she was covering herself from head to toe with mustard every day. It was for an Edinburgh Fringe show, of course – an eye-wateringly intense one-woman play, appropriately titled Mustard, about a woman who uses the condiment as a coping mechanism after the break-up of a toxic relationship.
“The show is my way of exploring previous relationships I’ve been in, and my own experience of mental health in a fresh way,” O’Connor explains. “I used to have an eating disorder when I was younger, and, like a lot of people with eating disorders, I was really obsessed with mustard because it has a really strong taste but is really low in calories.”
She didn’t put it on her body, though. That idea, O’Connor explains, has its roots in A Midnight Sandwich, a performance art piece she created that involved covering herself in peanut butter and jam, shaving it off, and squishing the mixture into sandwiches for the audience to eat - or not to eat, as the case may be. It was adapted for BBC Radio 4 in 2017.
"I really like the idea of exploring things like addiction and self-harm, but doing so through something seemingly absurd…”
“I really like the idea of exploring things like addiction and self-harm, but doing so through something seemingly absurd, like mustard, or peanut butter and jam,” she explains. “It’s a bit mad, but what is interesting is how quickly the audience gets on board, because everyone knows what it feels like to be obsessed by something.”
“I did use lot of mustard that festival, though,” O’Connor says. “I would go to the shop around the corner and buy all their supplies. And it was extremely excruciating to put on. It made my eyes stream, and I had to have like four showers afterwards to get the smell off.”
It was worth it, though. Mustard won a Fringe First when it ran at Summerhall two years ago, and it is returning to the Edinburgh Fringe this August in digital form as part of Culture Ireland’s showcase. Scotland’s stock of the yellow stuff – and O’Connor’s skin – is safe for now.
O’Connor was born in 1990 and grew up in County Clare in the west of Ireland. As a teenager, she was more interested in dance than theatre, but when she was 19 she appeared in a play at the Dublin Fringe Festival. It was Manchán Magan’s bilingual work Broken Croí/Heart Briste, it was a bit of a hit (and also, subsequently, an RTE radio drama), and although O’Connor got the part through a connection in the dance world, she found herself pondering whether plays excited her more than pliés.
“I just suddenly felt like I could write a play,” she says. “I was fascinated by the whole thing, and thought: ‘I could do this’. So I did. I wrote my first one-woman play when I was 19. I just splurged it out. And I think I’ve written, like, nine plays now.”
O’Connor moved to Scotland to study English and German at Edinburgh University. It was there, in 2010, that she staged her first Edinburgh Fringe show, and she produced work at the annual festival every August for the following nine years, mostly under the aegis of Sunday’s Child Theatre, the company she co-founded with long-term collaborator and director Hildegard Ryan. They put on shows in Edinburgh even when O’Connor spent most of one year studying abroad in Berlin, and even after she moved to London to train at Rose Bruford College.
“Something good has always come out of every festival… I’ve met someone… or I’ve booked a tour, or I’ve got a TV deal, or something…”
In 2012, she won the Best Emerging Artist Award at the National Student Drama Festival with her show Kiss Me And You Will See How Important I Am, which ran in both Edinburgh and London. In 2014, her show My Name Is Saoirse won multiple awards, toured to Edinburgh, Brighton, Dublin and Adelaide, and was subsequently adapted into another RTÉ radio drama.
“The Edinburgh Fringe definitely punctuates my year,” she says. “It’s where my work always starts. And, although it is really gruelling, and although some years are much better than others, something good has always come out of every festival, too. I’ve met someone that has opened a door for me, or I’ve booked a tour, or I’ve got a TV deal, or something.”
O’Connor’s plays are fierce and funny and full of surprises, just like her acting, and there are several themes that weave their way through them, too. Mental health is one – both Mustard and her 2016 play Overshadowed encompass eating disorders and anxiety. Ireland’s attitude to abortion is another – it is the subject of My Name Is Saoirse, and O’Connor’s entertaining 2018 two-hander Maz and Bricks. Her poem It Shouldn’t Have To Be This Hard went viral during the successful campaign to Repeal the Eighth in the same year, as well.
“I never intended to be a writer who wrote about ‘issues’,” she says. “I’ve always just written about what I feel passionate about. I don’t think about it too deeply. I write because I want to write, and because I feel compelled to write. And the theatre that I love and respect the most is theatre that is really gripping, but also has a message at the heart of it. So that’s what I try to do.”
“It’s hard to quantify how much art and theatre changed people’s minds and swayed the vote, but every little helps, right?”
Both Overshadowed and Maz and Bricks had lives beyond their Edinburgh Fringe runs. Overshadowed won the Fishamble New Writing Award – sparking an ongoing relationship with the acclaimed Irish theatre company – and was adapted into a BBC3 mini-series in 2018. Maz and Bricks, meanwhile, made it all the way to America, arriving at New York’s 59e59 in early 2020.
“I’m really proud of that play,” O’Connor says. “We first performed it in Ireland during the run up to the Repeal referendum, and the atmosphere in the audience was always so tense,” O’Connor says of the show. “It was incredible when the campaign was successful. It’s hard to quantify how much art and theatre changed people’s minds and swayed the vote, but every little helps, right?”
2019 marked O’Connor’s tenth anniversary of putting on shows at the Edinburgh Fringe. She has gone from a student “splurging” out plays to one of the festival’s most recognisable names, and a rapidly rising star of Irish theatre, with a burgeoning career in TV writing to boot. Outside of August, she splits her time between London and Ireland, creating her own work, developing screen projects, and occasionally acting in other productions, too. When we speak on the phone, for example, she is in Limerick, performing in a production of Mike Finn’s Waiting For Poirot.
“Television definitely pays more of my bills than theatre does,” she says. “With our theatre shows, we just try to break even and move onto the next project. I get so much creative fulfilment from being with an idea from the beginning, though. Maybe it’s because I’m a control freak, but producing my own shows over ten years has empowered me a lot, in my life and my career.”
“I have had a lot of existential thoughts over the last year, though,” she continues. “I felt very frustrated because I felt like my career had reached a really promising point. I’d just won a Fringe First for Mustard. I’d just taken Maz and Bricks to New York. I was really jealous of my boyfriend, who is a computer scientist - and I’ve never been jealous of him before.”
"Producing my own shows over ten years has empowered me a lot, in my life and my career…”
The pandemic put paid to any in-person work in Edinburgh last August, of course, so O’Connor had to skip a year. And, although there are plenty of live shows happening this summer, O’Connor is not involved in any: her one-year break has turned into a two-year hiatus. She is making up for it, though, with two digital events: Mustard, and new climate comedy Afloat, co-written with Ryan. Both will be available to watch on-demand online.
“Afloat is basically two girls, sitting at the top of Liberty Hall, which is one of the tallest buildings in Dublin, while the rest of the city is underwater because the climate apocalypse has hit,” O’Connor explains. “I don’t want to give too much away, but it is about how we perceive climate change, and how, if people are bombarded with messages about turning off lights and recycling, they will feel so paralysed by personal guilt that they will never organise against the twenty biggest corporations that are the main contributors.”
“Did you know, for example, that BP actually invented the term ‘carbon footprint’, because they wanted a way that would put the onus of feeling bad onto consumers instead of them?” she continues. “Afloat is about that. It’s about how we should be looking outwards when it comes to climate change, not inwards.”
And where will O’Connor be, while her two plays are running digitally at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe? “I’ll be in London,” she answers. “I’ll be in my sitting room with my cat, working on more stuff.”
Mustard and Afloat are available to watch on-demand online from August 6th, via Summerhall Online.
Bits and bobs, shouts and murmurs…
I’ve decided to do another round of Edinburgh Fringe recommendations this week, as a load more shows - both online and in-person - got announced yesterday. So, check out…
Move. An open-air performance of storytelling and song on Silverknowes Beach, from Slung Low, the Traverse Theatre, and Julia Taudevin and Kieran Hurley’s new company Disaster Plan. In-person.
Every Dollar Is A Soldier / With Money You’re A Dragon. An experimental 45-minute “virtual promenade performance” from Daniel York Loh, about two different migrant experiences - that of William Waldorf Astor, once the richest man in America, and that of the Chinese diaspora. Online.
Doppler. Grid Iron’s long-awaited, much-delayed adaptation of Erlend Loe’s 2004 Norwegian novel of the same name, about a man who tries to hide from the world in the woods. Performed, appropriately enough, amid the trees at Newhailes House and Gardens, east of the city. In-person.
Sweet F.A. The true story of a group of female factory workers who fought for their right to play football in 1916, performed on a specially-built stage at Tynecastle, the home of Hearts. In-person.
Screen 9. A verbatim piece from new company Piccolo Theatre, about the 2012 mass-shooting during a screening of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado, and the ensuing effect it had on the local community. In-person.
Enjoy your weekend…
That’s your lot for this issue. I’m back to my attempt to wrap my head around the Edinburgh Fringe programme this year. I’m going to be covering in-person events for The Stage, so look out for recommendations from me on Twitter.
I do have this horrible feeling that I’m going to show up at a deserted Summerhall, expecting to see a show, only to be told that I have accidentally booked myself a ticket for a live-stream instead. That will probably happen several times. I’ll keep you posted.
One last request for you to share this newsletter somehow, and I’ll leave you be. If you want to get in touch for any reason, you can just reply to this email, or contact me in all the usual places.
Fergus x