Two young women bound by more than circumstance. Outstanding performances, gorgeous specificity and a friendship from which it is impossible to look away.
Kate Gaul
5 Stars
Venue: Traverse Theatre
Edingburgh Festival
2026
Eva O’Connor’s For Dolores (Traverse Theatre) follows Mo, the Scottish one, and Réaltín, the Irish one, who meet as students in Edinburgh and party, play and blaze their way through the student dream. A few years later they are in Glasgow, dealing with friendship, motherhood and the consequences of the choices they have made. What begins as friendship becomes something much more consuming, a rivalry, an obsession, a chosen family and a relationship bound by love, dependency and desire.
It is a wonderful piece of writing: funny, raw, beautifully specific and full of Scottish and Irish detail. These women have histories, accents, politics, families, jokes and grievances; they feel completely of their places and completely themselves.
At the centre are two outstanding performances. Catriona Faint’s Mo and Lara McDonnell’s Réaltín have a chemistry that makes the friendship utterly convincing. They are funny together, irritating together, affectionate and cruel. They know each other too well. There is something almost addictive about watching them circle one another.
And there is a delicious queer edge to the relationship. O’Connor understands the complicated territory between friendship and desire, between loving someone and being in love with them, and the often-blurry line between intimacy, dependency and possession. These two young women are bound by far more than circumstance.
The play moves between their student years and the consequences of what happens later, gradually revealing how this extraordinary friendship has been formed and how it might unravel. What initially feels like a joyful, messy friendship becomes increasingly charged. The stakes rise, and the emotional architecture of the relationship begins to show itself.
Faint and McDonnell are superb at navigating those shifts. There is no simple victim or villain here. Both women are capable of generosity and selfishness, tenderness and damage. Their performances make the relationship feel lived rather than constructed.
I particularly loved the specificity of the world O’Connor creates. The Scottish and Irish details are not decoration; they are fundamental to who these women are and to the tensions between them. The humour is similarly rooted in character rather than simply inserted for relief.
Jim Culleton‘s direction gives the performers room to let the relationship breathe, while the production gradually tightens around the events that will change everything. There is a real sense of watching two people who once thought they would always belong to each other discover that love, in whatever form it takes, doesn’t necessarily make a relationship safe.For Dolores is funny, messy, moving and deeply human. It is a beautifully observed portrait of female friendship pushed to its limits, and a reminder that some of the most important relationships in our lives are also the most complicated
Kate Gaul, Theatre Now
