BACK TO BARRYTOWN
Actor Colm Meaney takes us on a trip down memory lane to the fictional suburb and revisits the story of Roddy Doyle’s The Snapper
It’s been 30 years since the fictional Dublin suburb of Barrytown and its most famous baby was introduced in The Snapper A three-part documentary series, Back To Barrytown, kicked off last Sunday, telling the story of Roddy Doyle’s muchloved Barrytown trilogy, intercut with interviews from the cast and crew of the films.
This fictional suburb and its characters were a microcosm — not only of Dublin or Ireland at that time, but of ordinary lives; their dreams and ambitions, their triumphs and failures, all documented in The
Commitments, The Snapper and
The Van.
In tonight’s episode, Colm Meaney journeys back to The Snapper, a film that is still as popular and quotable as it was when it was released in 1993.
Through the eyes of cast and crew, including Tina Kellegher, writer Roddy Doyle and director Stephen Frears, the stories behind the memorable characters of Georgie Burgess and Sharon Curley and how they were brought to our screens are revisited.
Sharon Curley (played by Kellegher), a young single woman living at home with her father (Meaney), her mother and large brood of siblings, becomes pregnant after married neighbour Georgie Burgess takes advantage of her while she’s drunk.
How her family comes to terms with this unexpected pregnancy is both hilariously funny and touching.
Audiences can also explore the suburb of Kilbarrack — a place synonymous with the world of Barrytown — through the eyes of the film makers, learn the human stories of the locals and see why the film still endures both there and beyond. Three decades on, Meaney – who featured across the trilogy of films – explores the world of Barrytown: the people who populated it, the real lives that inspired it, and those who helped create it.
He peers through this fictional window into a brief moment in the history of modern Ireland: a time when the fortunes of the country, its citizens (and its soccer players) were changing utterly — with plenty of laughs along the way. n Back To Barrytown is on RTÉ One tonight at 9.30pm.