Back to Barrytown Donal O’donoghue reflects on Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown trilogy on screen, ahead of a new three-part TV documentary marking the thirtieth anniversary of The Commitments
Nearly 30 years on from the premiere of The Commitments, a new documentary series reels in the three Barrytown films. Donal O’donoghue tunes in
They meet in a Dublin pub, “shaking elbows” in greeting. “How long since I’ve seen you?” asks the actor. “Apparently six years,” says the writer. Roddy Doyle smiles, Colm Meaney laughs, two pints sit on the counter. They raise a glass and then get down to business, the actor putting an old VHS tape into the recorder as the antique TV lights up the past. “I haven’t seen them since they were made,” says Roddy Doyle of the films that took his Barrytown Trilogy (The Commitments, The Snapper, The Van) from page to screen and gave us Dublin in the rare new times, comic and tragic, with blistering dialogue that told of the way things were – and possibly in some ways, still are.
Back to Barrytown, a new three-part TV series (each of the films gets an episode) reels in the years. It is the story of the films rather than Doyle’s novels, with Meaney, who starred in all three, as our guide, reminiscing as well as chewing the fat with locals on city streets. But this is more than just a rosy recall. There is a bite in some of the interviews, at least in the opening ‘Commitments’ episode, where Glen Hansard recalls something that director, the late Alan Parker, said to him which still hurts. And Doyle talks of a couple of moments in the film that never rang true to him.
I interviewed Roddy Doyle in May ’92, some eight months after the world premiere of The Commitments at the Savoy cinema in Dublin. Back then, the Dubliner was still earning his brass as a teacher of geography and English at Greendale Community School in Kilbarrack, even though he was already a bit of a literary rock star (four days after The Commitments premiere, his second novel, The Van, was nominated for the Booker Prize). He was working on his fourth novel, also set in Barrytown, but no longer with the Rabbitte family at its centre. Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha would win him the Booker Prize in 1993. At that stage, he had said farewell to his career as a teacher to work full-time as a writer. Having put Barrytown on the literary map, he was also experiencing the heat of the limelight.
In 1992, following the global success of The Commitments, Doyle’s greatest critics were in his own backyard. “I don’t think they ever rated me but I’m finished now because of my involvement with the film and all the hype attached to it,” he told me at the time with, I imagine, that thin smile playing on his face. “In fact, one of the criticisms of The Van was that it was a screenplay masquerading as a novel and that I’d written it with an eye to Hollywood. Anyone who reads the book will realise that it is not a Hollywood film. I mean, Jesus, two middle-aged men with a chipper van is not the stuff of a £40 million budget. That’s drivel.”
Both The Snapper (1993) and The Van (1996) were directed by Stephen Frears, less grand affairs than Parker’s razzmatazz production. Before Riverdance, there was The Commitments and in the bleak beginnings of the ’90s, it was a Technicolor splash amid 40 shades of grey. It was as if Fame (an earlier Parker hit) had come to town with an ad in Hot Press looking for hungry young performers. There is some brilliant archive footage of these umpteen auditions, not least Dave Finnegan (who would play headbanger, Mickah Walsh) being auditioned by a visibly impressed Alan Parker. Many of the cast and crew (Andrew Strong being a notable exception) contribute to the documentary, with the narrator among them. A young Dubliner, Robert Arkins, was plucked from obscurity to play the central character of Jimmy Rabbitte. Now we see him in a darkened garage, dusting off an old script, as he recalls how his life would never be the same again. “The big challenge for me was trying to achieve music on the page,” Doyle says of his first stab at screenwriting with The Commitments (the finished screenplay was written by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais with Doyle having to fight his corner to get his credit).
Music, like it was in Parker’s film, is the heartbeat of the story of The Commitments. The music of the dialogue, the music of some guy beating the lard out of a set of drums, the music of Andrew Strong busting out soul classics, the music of Meaney’s Jimmy Rabbitte defending his beloved Elvis. Barrytown seems like another country now, the three books pioneering in how they brought modern Dublin to literary life, the three films living on in the music of the past. In the following years, Doyle would go darker on the page (The Woman Who Walked Into Doors) and on screen (Family) but the humanity, humour and truth of The Barrytown Trilogy still beats on Dublin’s streets.