Conviction: Can theatre do anything about the trauma of lockdown? It turns out it can.

Two sisters become each other’s lifeline during the bleakest months of COVID-19.

St Kevin’s Park, Dublin Fringe Festival

★★★★★

Looking back, actors put on a brave face during lockdown. Subordinated to the camera-frames of streamed plays, they often carried on like it was business as usual – making studied approaches to new performances. It was difficult not to re-emerge from those plays without some gratitude, as if the refusal to break character had become a means to hold our hands, and help us endure our reality.

Not many theatre artists have made plays about their experiences of quarantine, how it separated them from their normal lives, and took away months of work. Eva O’Connor’s stirring audio play Conviction is an adaptation of an essay published last year in the literary journal Tolka. In that, O’Connor confessed to a private hell, of being glued to a bed, blindsided by grim thoughts, of crying nearly every day. To a theatre audience, a return to lockdown could easily seem gruelling, but O’Connor’s story gains from the time that has passed, to lockdown becoming a bad memory. Experienced in the quiet surroundings of St. Kevin’s Park, it feels more like a soft calming admission, as if to say: yes, that did happen.