Lara McDonnell and Catriona Faint told David Hennessy about the new play For Dolores as it comes to Edinburgh Fringe fresh from being lauded in Ireland.
Eva O’Connor’s For Dolores is having its UK premiere at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh as part of the Fringe festival.
For Dolores comes fresh from Irish runs at Lime Tree Theatre, Limerick, the Mick Lally Theatre where it was part of Galway International Arts Festival and then the Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire.
The production comes from Fishamble: The New Play Company.
Eva O’Connor is the award- winning London- based Clare playwright. Her previous work includes Maz and Bricks, Chicken and the Scotsman Fringe First winner, Mustard.
Director Jim Culleton directs the cast of Lara McDonnell and Catriona Faint.
Lara McDonnell’s screen credits include Artemis Fowl and Belfast. She also played the title role of Matilda in the West End, Mary Warren in The Crucible at the Gaiety Theatre and was part of Sam Mendes’ Jez Butterworth play The Hills of California on both Broadway and the West End.
Catriona Faint has been heralded as a rising star of Scottish theatre and played Sebastian in an all female/non-binary cast of The Tempest at Tron Theatre.
McDonnell and Faint play Mo and Réaltín, two friends, who partied, played and blazed their way through the Edinburgh student dream.
Set in Glasgow a couple of years later, For Dolores is about friendship, motherhood and coming to terms with your worst mistakes.
Actresses Lara and Catriona took time to chat to the Irish World ahead of the play coming to Edinburgh.
Do you remember how the script struck you when you first read it?
Lara: “The writing was just so, so good and succinct and beautiful and witty and funny.
“But I think what I loved most about it was how elegantly Eva is able to describe everyday feelings that we all have had in such a beautifully poetic way but not so poetic that it’s precocious or overbearing in any way.
“She does it in such beautiful, simple yet poetic language and it sums up a feeling that I don’t think I would ever be able to put succinct words on.
“I was like, ‘Oh, I need to do this. It’s a need, not a want. A need.”
Catriona: “Both characters were just so well written.
“I was actually just really excited to do the audition because I was like, ‘I’m really excited to show my take on Mo’.”
I get the impression it’s very much a two hander so there is no protagonist/ antagonist and more two different sides of the story…
Lara: “I think so.
“I think we’re on very equal footing and I think there’s a lot being asked of both of us in both very similar and also in very different ways.
“The characters are very different but they’re also similar which is what creates this beautiful friendship that we get to portray.
“I think we both have our faults but we both have really fun loving qualities so I think everyone will see a lot of themselves in both the characters.”
It looks at a female friendship formed in those young college years when those friendships are everything..
Lara: “Especially when you’re in uni, you’re going into such a new, fresh part of your life and you’re becoming a person for the first time.
“You’re meeting all these people and you go through so many highs and lows together.
“You go through the highest moments and the lowest moments whether that be losing someone or graduating, or if it’s going out for a night out and then also dealing with the hangover together the next morning.
“You just really are with each other for the whole thing.
“I think we get to explore a really beautiful thing.
“We meet them at the beginning of the play at a desperate time in their friendship of trying to salvage back what they’ve lost but then throughout the play, we get to demonstrate really peaceful moments of why they’re trying so hard to salvage it because it’s such a beautiful friendship and so to get to show those moments is really, really lovely.
“It’s really special and any of my friends who’ve come to watch it have gone away like in bits.”
Catriona: “I think everything in uni is quite intense but obviously that can then coincide with the fact that you do make these quite intense relationships.
“I think what the play does so well is show then how things can just turn on its head.
“Mo views the relationship quite differently to the way Réaltín does.
“Realtine’s quite dramatic and with her, things can be beautiful and romanticised and Mo’s actually straight to the point, ‘It was actually like this’.
“And neither’s right and neither’s wrong but it’s just the ways of that you’re growing up, you’re already going through a lot in life anyway and then obviously you make these relationships which you want to last a lifetime and it can be quite intense.”
It sounds like a play that really takes you and the audience through an array of emotions, do you go through the wringer?
Lara: “A little bit, yes but in a really great, satisfying way.
“One of the reasons I love theatre so much is that we do get to go on a whole continuous journey with these characters.
“It’s so much fun to get to go on that journey and bring an audience along with you.
“We’ve been having a lot of fun with the reactions.
“We were in the Mick Lally Theatre in Galway for the International Arts Festival and we were so close to the audience.
“We always say that as actors, we can see a lot more of the audience than the audience think we can but with this, I could see in someone’s eyes whether their pupils were dilating or not, just every ring of emotion that was going through them.
“I feel really, really lucky because this play is so beautiful and the fact that it’s earning these much deserved reactions is really special.
“They (the audience) go through the wringer with us too.
“There’s a lot of highs and a lot of lows.
“There are moments where we’re having a good old time and then something will just catch you really off guard which is so much fun to get to do as an actor and explore that.
“We have so many moments where we’re talking about something and we realise we’ve said something that’s actually quite deep and upsetting and hits in a certain way, and we hear that in the audience a lot.
“There’s some gasps which is always quite fun.”
Catriona: “It’s been interesting seeing it in all the different venues and I think it will be really interesting going to Edinburgh.
“I’m excited.
“It’s been funny (in Ireland) with all the Scottish humour in the play and things like that.
“I didn’t know how it was going to land and it’s landed brilliantly but it will be interesting to go across to the motherland and see how it reacts there.”
Speaking about audience reactions from the crowd, I hear audible gasps, like you mentioned, are very common..
Catriona: “Oh yeah, absolutely.
“Especially in Mick Lally where it’s much smaller, you literally see people putting their hands over their mouth.”
Lara: “There’s a moment in the play where something is very casually revealed, a very big piece of information.
“My sister came to see the show and she gasped in such a way that she clutched her pearls.
“She was she was like, ‘Oh my god’.
“We had our first night in Dublin last night, which is where I’m from, so I had a lot of friends in watching.
“We went for a drink afterwards and they wanted to dissect so much of it because there are so many moments where you are just knocked off your feet in a really good way.
“Something will take you off guard which is so much fun for us to get to do.”
It is full circle for the characters, isn’t it? Edinburgh is where the story began..
Catriona: “Exactly.
“It will be interesting because quite a few people already that have come to watch, even in Dublin, said that they’ve been to Edinburgh Uni and they can relate to everything that’s spoken about.
“I think it’s how well written it is and obviously because Eva went to uni in Edinburgh, she like lived that life and it’s perfectly accurate.
“It’s funny because there’s quite a few Scottish slang words in the play and at first I was a bit like, ‘Oh my! I would never expect an Irish writer to know these words’.
“It was all perfect and so I give it to her but obviously it’s lived experience.
“But Eva and Jim (Culleton, director) were very big on being like, ‘If there’s anything you want to add, any Scottishisms, then please go for it’.
“It was great in that way as well.
“It felt like it was a group process.
“I think it will go down a treat with the Edinburgh audiences at the Traverse Theatre because just of how relatable it is.”
What about you Lara and relating to the Irish character of Réaltín. Did you find it more universal in that way?
Lara: “I really, really did.
“She speaks in a very similar way because I’m also very dramatic.
“There’s a great speech in the play particularly about being Irish and being away from home and then having to return home.
“There’s also a lot of references to being Irish in Edinburgh and really taking on the identity when you go away from home as being Irish even if you’ve never been especially patriotic.
“Which I I did.
“I live in London so I know what it’s like to be an Irish girl living away and be known as an Irish girl while every time you go home, you’re the one who left, so I did understand.”
How would you describe your characters?
Lara: “Réaltín is very bubbly, very sociable.
“She’s a bit life of the party but there’s a bit of melancholy to her.
“She has a very distinctive way of looking at the world in that she can romanticise a lot and paint quite a pretty picture.
“She’s very poetic in terms of how she views life and that comes with a lot of melancholy and sadness as well.
“She becomes a mother.
“I think that really changes her.
“She’s still very much that person.
“She’s very dramatic and she can exaggerate and she likes creating a story but I think there is a bit more groundedness to her after having the baby and I think she sees a bit more what’s fundamental as opposed to when we hear about her in her uni days when she first met Mo.”
Cat: “I’d say Mo wears her heart on her sleeve and she’s got a very razor sharp energy.
“She’s very passionate, very patriotic and she’s not afraid to say what she thinks and feels which is what I absolutely love about her because I’m also like that as a person.
“I think she’s come from quite a tricky background and I think she has got a bit of a chip on her shoulder.
“Mo and Réaltín are very different people.
“It’s how do you navigate a friendship when you’ve come from very different backgrounds and very different circumstances but still have so much love for each other?
“It’s about understanding each other and not judging each other and I think the play tackles that so well because there is just so much love there and it shouldn’t matter class or anything like that in regards to friendships if you really love a person.
“They’re brilliantly different but they’re also brilliantly very similar and I think that’s what you slowly realise when you watch the play.”
Although they have been in each other’s lives for so long and chosen family, they have now come to a point where they have to re-evaluate or be certain that they do choose each other, is that right?
Catriona: “Yeah, I think the play starts and you can see that this is make or break.
“They either put this work in and they do it because they clearly love each other and also with the baby, with Dolores as well, it’s bigger than just the two of them now.
“There’s a child but you can see that there’s so much love worth fighting for so you see them at their worst at the start and then slowly see how incredible their relationship is and whether or not they make it, who knows?”
Lara: “They are chosen family in every sense of the word in that they’re two people raising a child together and so it is not just about salvaging a relationship for them, there’s something bigger at play here which is her and making sure that she’s loved and happy and that they also have their relationship figured out for Dolores.
“But I think she’s kind of a constant presence because she’s a big reason why the play happens.”
Something else that comes into the play is addiction. I believe it’s your character Catriona..
Cat: “Yeah, I think it’s a really great topic that Eva touched on without it being the whole thing and she dealt with it so well because that’s the whole point of uni, isn’t it?
“You drink and you get rat arsed and you make silly mistakes and you laugh about it and you joke and you get back on it the next day and you’re all hungover together, and that’s the whole thing.
“But then it’s what happens when that doesn’t stop for someone?
“I think especially at that point in Mo’s life, there was a lot of stuff probably going on at home.
“People deal with things like that through drinking.
“I think the way it was touched on is brilliant because it’s one of those addictions that will slowly kill someone and by that I mean relationships, not just physically, as in the people in your life, and you can really see that in this play.
“Mo always just tries to back it off as, ‘Oh, it’s just one drink’.
“Or ‘it’s just this, it’s just that’, and it’s coming to terms with the fact that it’s a problem and how it can affect other people.”
Lara you have worked with big names like Kenneth Branagh and Sam Mendes, what has been a highlight of your career up to now?
Lara: “This has been a big highlight for me.
“I’m so proud to be a part of this play.
“I think the writing is so beautiful and I’m so proud of our work that’s gone into it and I love getting to tell this story every night.
“But the two names that you just mentioned are such a big meaningful experiences for me not only because of who they are.
“I got to work with Kenneth Branagh twice both on Artemis Fowl and on Belfast.
“I was very young and it was a very big introduction into the industry for me and he created such a beautiful, beautiful, safe, comforting environment that I felt very able to settle into.
“I never felt anxious or intimidated, which you can.
“I think I was 14 when I worked with him for the first time and it changed my life.
“It has completely changed my life.
“Belfast is a project that I hold very dear to my heart.
“I was really, really proud to be a small part of that because it’s such a beautiful film.
“And then The Hills of California with Sam Mendes and Jez Butterworth was also one of those projects that was just life altering, life changing.
“I was like 19, 20, 21 while doing that play and I was again so, so unbelievably proud to be a part of that play and part of that cast.
“I could have just been sleeping on the side of the stage and I would have been so happy just to have been amongst that story and amongst those people.
“I love those two jobs, they meant the absolute world to me and they changed who I am.
“I kind of measure my life by those kind of jobs so I feel incredibly lucky to get to add this onto it because I feel very lucky to have been trusted with telling the story the same with how I felt with those two because they’re so big and personal to not only the audience but to the people who created them.”
Catriona you have been heralded as a rising star of Scottish theatre with break out roles such as Dracula and The Tempest, what has been your highlight?
Catriona: “I would say this.
“The key ones for me would be Dracula, as you mentioned, with Sally Cookson.
“It was just an incredible show to do with National Theatre Scotland.
“It was an all-female and non-binary cast and it was rewritten to be set in the north of Scotland.
“It was just a really fun production to be a part of.”
Would you like to see For Dolores get another life after Edinburgh, perhaps taking it to London?
Lara: “I love this play so much and I think it is so beloved by the people who’ve seen it so far so I want as many people to see it as humanly possible.
“I think it’s really hit home with lots and lots of people so I want more to see it.”
For Dolores is at Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh until 30 August as part of TravFest, presented as part of the Culture Ireland Showcase.
For tickets and more information, click here.