When your name is Emily O’Mahoney, there’s a fair chance you have Irish ancestry, as I find when I catch up with the actor playing the lead role in Never Closer, a 2022 drama by Australian playwright Grace Chapple.

Director Lachlan Houen believes this is probably the third production of the play. Full of lively Irish dialogue, the work is set on Christmas Eve, 1987, in a fictional Northern Irish border town during The Troubles which eviscerated the country from around 1968 to 1998.

Briefly, a reunion of childhood friends at Deirdre’s house blows up when one of them, Niamh, turns up with her surprise English fiancé and all the home truths come out.

O’Mahoney couldn’t be more pleased to be playing the lead role of Deirdre in a cast that also features Nick Bisa, Joel Hrbek, Breanna Kelly, Pippin Carroll and Natasha Lyall.

A former Merici College student in Canberra who has performed in Rockspeare at The Mill Theatre, she’s been in Melbourne for two years, first studying journalism at RMIT and then theatre at the Victorian College of the Arts, where she has just finished first year.

Back on vacation, she reconnected with Houen, whom she had met while taking part in Canberra Youth Theatre’s Emerge Company, founded by actor Christopher Samuel Carroll.

O’Mahoney has nothing but praise for the relatively new theatre course at the VCA, which runs in tandem with the acting course but focuses more on writing, training and directing – it’s the writing component that attracts her most.

She’s still a way off graduation but says she would love to be an in-house artist with an independent theatre company such as the experimental performance collective Pony Cam.

Inevitably, O’Mahoney and I share our Irish ancestral stories. Her grandparents on her father’s side migrated to Australia in the 1960s from Dublin – not from the north, but well aware of the tensions of The Troubles.

When her family heard she’d been cast in Never Closer, they became very excited, bombarding her with messages such as: “Did you hear about this?” and “Watch this on Instagram.”

“I’ve been hearing about it all my life, and this is a wonderful opportunity,” she says.

As for Chapple, her mother is from Ireland, so there’s a semi-autobiographical element. More than that, O’Mahoney believes Chapple has an acute ear for dialogue and its subtle nuances.

“It’s funny, it’s sharp – it’s so natural, a gift to an actor,” she says. “It’s brutal as well, and without giving too much away, it doesn’t exactly have a happy ending.”

Her character Deirdre – a classic Irish name if ever there was one – is the stay-at-home figure. The whole play is set in her house and while she’s grounded in her town, most of the other characters have moved away.

“I think I love her so much because she’s stubborn, and I’m also stubborn,” O’Mahoney says. “She’s strong in her beliefs. She’s a Catholic and very much in support of a united Ireland.

“Her sense of loyalty extends to all parts of her life, but it’s not shown back to her, and she experiences loss and betrayal, although she does not lose her independence. She’s single, and part of the plot is to do with romance.”

Most of the characters are teenagers in the prologue, but the main action sees them at around 28 or 29, after most have been away, creating a fractured group. The cast has worked out that the fictional town is something like Omagh, roughly 90 minutes from Belfast.

While some characters are involved in politics, the play is humanistic rather than political. O’Mahoney says the characters are spread across the spectrum, and Chapple’s empathy extends across the range.

“It’s a tragedy,” she says, “but it’s so bloody funny.”

Never Closer, Courtyard Studio, February 19-28.