Traverse Theatre
Four stars
Mo and Réaltín have a story to tell in Eva O’Connor’s new play, which arrives in Edinburgh after a run at Galway International Arts Festival. Given that this odd couple - one a radical Glasgow girl, the other a Cranberries loving Irish émigré - bonded over a bottle of Buckfast in a broken lift during freshers week at Edinburgh University, the transfer of O’Connor’s increasingly wild affair is all too appropriate.
Somehow Mo and Réaltín have landed in couples therapy, which forms the setting for the entire play, with the duo talking out front on Alyson Cummins’ office bound set, as if the audience are the therapist, listening in as they confess all. The room can’t contain them for long, mind, as they rewind on the events that brought them here. These begin with Réaltín’s whirlwind romance with a muscle-bound Finn who only wears each pair of his underpants once before throwing them away, to a brief but crucial dalliance with Mo’s brother. It is the end result of both that gives the play its title.
O’Connor’s set up in Jim Culleton’s production for Ireland’s Fishamble company in association with a host of partners makes for a set of scurrilous exchanges in a ferociously comic first half that hints at things to come. Even then there is little by way of apology in a gloriously dysfunctional ride symbolised by the mess of empty bottles and hard partying detritus beneath the office floor.
Catriona Faint as Mo and Lara McDonnell as Réaltín grab hold of O’Connor’s potty mouthed script with a rapid-fire relish that can’t contain them, and before long they’re on the floor, dancing both for themselves and the accidental responsibility their situation has landed them with. This is delivered with such ebullient charm that you’re rooting for them to pull through from the off in a fearless study of female friendship in all its messy glory. What a real therapist might make of such a yarn is best left filed away.
Until 30 Aug, various times.
The Herald, August 9th 2026
ends
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