As 2025 draws to a close, we spoke with outgoing IASH/Traverse Creative Fellow Michael John O’Neill about his time in the fellowship.
Originally from the north coast of Ireland and now based in Scotland, O’Neill is an award-winning playwright. His acclaimed play, This Is Paradise, was first staged at the Traverse Theatre during the 2021 Traverse Festival and won the BBC Popcorn Award. Now he's developing a new work with the support of the fellowship, and shares a little more about it below...
Tell us about your new play in development with the IASH/Traverse Creative Fellowship. How did this idea first emerge?
The play is about the inheritances we never asked for (familial, societal) and how they constrain what a life can become. It takes on a mythic shape as it goes, but at its centre is this image of a young man and his friend, and their shared determination to stay friends with one another in a state of playfulness. And then, like the unfeeling brute that I am, I keep throwing things in their way to make that difficult for them.
The idea started with me thinking about my own friendships, from youth to whatever this moment is right now where I find it hard to recall basic everyday information, like the name of that actor who was in that thing (Christian Slater; Young Guns II). I was thinking about the intimacy of deep friendship, and how strange it is to look back and chart what other elements have crept into that space over time. Differing ideas, harder ideologies, hurt.
It can be unsettling to realise that someone you once understood as almost as a direct reflection of yourself has taken a completely different course, and that you have too. So, I started with that experience of unease, and now if we’re both lucky you might one day get to sit in a studio theatre and experience it too.
How does your time at IASH shape the play’s development, and what specific academic or historical resources have influenced the work so far?
IASH has been an incredible gift. Of all the wonderful components of that gift, the thing that has most directly influenced the play has been the weekly work-in-progress seminars from the academic fellows. The range has been astonishing. One week, the topic of the seminar might be new approaches to decolonising large language models; the next, the politics of Pekingese dog breeding.
I loved being able to turn up in the seminar room every week and let myself be surprised by whatever unexpected world opened up in front of me. It provided what felt like a necessary intellectual derailment alongside the iterative work of writing and rewriting scenes. It meant I was constantly bringing new questions, frames, or bits of language back to the desk, and seeing what they did to the writing that afternoon.
Your plays often grapple with the personal and political. In your view, what role does theatre play today in making sense of, and hopefully mending, social fractures and ideological divides?
I’ll push back slightly on the premise of this question, in that I do not think art has any business mending anything.
I see what we do more as a confrontation. It is a way of pointing at something that just whipped past us at the edge of the campfire and saying, did you see that? What was that? What does it mean that it’s here with us? Should we kill it or worship it as our new god? A story can make a question feel unavoidable, when it might otherwise have stayed politely buried.
How do you maintain hope in your storytelling, even when exploring darker human experiences?
Hope is crucial to the whole process. Even in the bleakest setting, your characters must have that capacity for hope somewhere in them, however diminished, otherwise it’s very difficult to build a story around them. The only reason I’m down there in the dark is to mine for that hope.
The IASH/Traverse Creative Fellowship is designed to give writers time and space to craft ambitious work. What has been the most valuable part of the fellowship so far for you?
Exactly that. A wildly generous amount of time to free write, to follow the work where it falls, and to figure out what I actually have to say, right there on the page.
What’s something you’ve learned about your creative process during this residency that surprised you?
Sharing early drafts induces a form of ego death, and that’s good, actually.
Looking ahead, what are your hopes for this play once it reaches an audience? What impact would you like it to have?
I think my ambitions are quite meagre really. I mainly just hope that it’s seen by an audience, and that some of them are energized by it to feel whatever they are going to feel, and that I can easily dismiss those who don’t like it after only a couple of hours dredging their socials. And then among the people who do vibe with it, it turns out one of them is a maybe-aristo, or at least someone with eye-watering generational wealth, who commissions three plays a year just for the love of the game, and all the commissions are guaranteed for production and nationwide touring, and that this great honking money-fairy happens to be looking for a house playwright for the next twenty to twenty five years. And then that contract does not require me to spend more than a couple of nights away from home at any point, or to write my own marketing copy. And then later when that quarter-century run of inarguable hits comes to an end, I feel broadly positive about the work beyond the many accolades, and that here and there my writing lives in the world in the same way it lived in my head. But that’s just me, a simple word-farming man with a simple word-farming man’s dream of linear glory and a reasonable pension.
What would you say to the incoming 2026 IASH/Traverse Fellow?
Let yourself enjoy this time, Jack. And if you open the top drawer of the desk and there isn’t a box of tablet in there, then there’s someone who has keys to your office who owes you at least one box of tablet.