Eva O'Connor


Eva O'Connor is an Irish stage actress and playwright.
O'Connor's play My Name Is Saoirse—a one-woman show in which she starred—was performed at the 2014 Edinburgh Fringe and 2014 Dublin Fringe Festival. The show won the First Fortnight Award at the latter; the prize included a performance at the following year's festival.
She wrote and performed acclaimed shows in each of the four years 2010–2013 at the Edinburgh Fringe: Clinical Lies in 2010; My Best Friend Drowned in a Swimming Pool in 2011; National Student Drama Festival award winner Kiss Me and You Will See How Important I Am in 2012; and Substance in 2013.
She is noted for her performance in Broken Croí, Heart Briste during the 2009 Dublin Fringe Festival, for which she was nominated for Best Supporting Actress as part of the Irish Times Theatre Awards.
Her short story The Midnight Sandwich was written for BBC Radio 4: her reading of it was broadcast in October 2017.

''Overshadowed''

O'Connor's play Overshadowed was first performed in 2015 at the Tiger Dublin Fringe, where it was awarded the ; it subsequently appeared at the 2016 First Fortnight and Edinburgh Fringe festivals and toured Ireland in October 2016. A year later, in October 2017, BBC 3 broadcast an eight-episode drama based on Overshadowed. Later that month she discussed its portrayal of anorexia on television with Hadley Freeman on BBC Radio 4's Front Row.
Reviewing Overshadowed for The Independent, Kate Leaver wrote: "Anorexia is a notoriously difficult subject for TV, movies, books and songs to get right. It is the deadliest mental illness—20 per cent of sufferers die prematurely because of their condition—and yet, we struggle to make decent, responsible pop culture about it. And so, I'm left wondering, is it even possible to make responsible art about eating disorders? What's more important: telling our stories for the purpose of increased compassion, or protecting those who might be susceptible to the disorder from feeling inspired? We may have an answer, in a brand new TV show out this week on BBC3. In this show, anorexia is actually personified. The illness is played by one of the writers of the show, Eva O'Connor, and it works quite effectively to demonstrate that an eating disorder is separate from the person it latches onto. Anorexia, as we see here, is a parasite and a manipulator – more complex and more sinister than a diet".