Eva O’Connor: ‘I think I’m running out of skeletons in my closet’

“I think I’m running out of skeletons in my closet, I’m happy to say,” says Irish playwright, Eva O’Connor, about drawing on personal experiences for her work.

“I think as I get older I get a bit more disentangled from my characters, which is good. When I was younger I often wrote from a place of pain, I couldn’t not write, that was how I coped,” she told Róisín Ingle, in the latest Róisín Meets podcast.

The 26 year old from Co Clare has written eight plays, the most recent of which is Maz and Bricks, currently running at the Project Arts Theatre in Dublin before heading to the Belltable in Limerick next week.

It tells the story of two very different young people who meet and become friends over the course of a day in Dublin, Maz on her way to a 'Repeal the 8th' demonstration and Bricks, played by Stephen Jones, to meet the mother of his young daughter.

There are elements of O’Connor’s own life in the play, as there is with much of her writing, including the award-winning Overshadowed, about a young woman battling anorexia, which is being adapted for BBC Three television starring O’Connor.

Her one-woman show, My Name is Saoirse, which won the First Fortnight Award at the Dublin Fringe in 2014, dealt with the subject of abortion in rural Ireland. For the press around the play O'Connor spoke candidly about having an abortion herself, something she said shocked some people close to her.

It has not deterred her from putting herself into her work, however.

“I’m much happier now, but I think there will always be elements of me and people that I know who will inspire me and my work.

“It’s like, if you’re happy and in love you’re just the most boring person in the world,” she laughs.

You can catch Eva O’Connor and Stephen Jones in Maz and Bricks until this Saturday, 13th May at the Project Arts theatre in Dublin and at the Belltable in Limerick from 17-20th May.