I think you could superimpose this story into any city in the world and it would still make sense...
RODDY DOYLE TALKS TO MARION MCMULLEN ABOUT HOW THE COMMITMENTS HAVE CONQUERED THE WORLD SINCE BURSTING FROM THE PAGES OF HIS BESTSELLING NOVEL 35 YEARS AGO
Your novel, The Commitments, has been both a hit movie and stage success. Does it feel like 35 years since it was first published?
Someone pointed it out to me yesterday. I suppose I was aware it was a while ago, but I didn’t realise it was 35 years.
It feels like a long time, but in some ways it feels like yesterday.
I don’t know how many images or covers of the book I’ve seen over the years. It’s quite a lot.
There was an edition in Hebrew that was sent to me. It is extraordinary, but there’s nothing on the cover to say it’s The Commitments.
I remember joking that it could be the Tel Aviv phone book they’d sent me. It was the most unusual one perhaps and there have been beautiful ones from Korea and Japan. The art on the covers is just so lovely. It’s always a nice experience to see a different cover.
It’s not just the measure of success, it’s an emotional thing as well.
What do you think is the appeal of the story about working class kids in Dublin starting a band?
It’s a very universal story. The urge to create art and to create music, to create noise, to defy the previous generation by creating something new. That’s not just an Irish thing, I think it is a global thing.
I think what I did was take a reasonable global story about young people wanting to assert themselves and planted it in a square kilometre of my city. People get it and get the humour and the wit.
I think you could superimpose the story into any city in the world and it would still make sense.
What was it like when the show first opened in 2013?
I was over in London for three months at the start of it and I was doing re-writes and adjusting lines, and chatting to the director every day, six days a week.
It moved from a school hall in Kensington to the Palace Theatre in London and seeing the set being built and the cast getting acquainted with the stage was exciting. I was still rewriting right up to the previews. I was at them all, and to say I knew the thing inside out was not an exaggeration.
What was the opening night like?
My family came over from Dublin and also people who helped with the original novel. It was a really great night.
I do find opening nights quite hard, really quite difficult. When I had an opening night in the past I didn’t go. I went for a walk and came back when it was over.
I kind of force myself now to go, it seems almost churlish to say endure it. But I find it a little bit easier now.
But the fact this book – that there was no interest in 30 years beforehand – was now on a stage in a theatre with a capacity of something like 1,500 and people were laughing and the music was so brilliant, well, it was really an emotional experience.
Are you looking forward to the new tour with Coronation Street actor Nigel Pivaro (Terry Duckworth) as Jimmy Rabbitte’s Da?
It’s so exciting. I came over for rehearsals and it’s a great experience when you hear the cast actually singing and delivering a line that you wrote 35 years ago.
The tour is going all over the UK and Ireland finishing up in Brighton in July, 2023.
The show features great songs like Try A Little Tenderness, River Deep, Mountain High, Mustang Sally and I Heard It Through The Grapevine. Did you listen to music while writing the book?
[Laughs] No, I didn’t, I suppose that’s a bit ironic, but I do listen to music now. When I was writing The Commitments, I was listening to cassettes and re-reeling and playing a line again trying to impose the Dublin accent on these songs.
I didn’t really start listening to music when I wrote until I gave up teaching. Now I listen to a lot of jazz, which would have Jimmy Rabbitte turning in his grave, but I think Jimmy would probably be listening to jazz himself now as well.
What’s great about jazz is there is so much of it.
I’m not interested in becoming a jazz aficionado in any way but it seems to me it is an enormous bottomless well.
I could probably spend the rest of my life listening to John Coltrane and someone would say. ‘Ah, but you haven’t heard this version’.
What is it like hearing other people speaking your words?
It’s always a little bit jarring. It’s not that I have got a voice in my head that is Jimmy Rabbitte or any of the characters, but when you hear someone else taking a line it is almost like telling a joke, and someone comes in with the punchline before you get to it and they get the credit for the joke that you’ve put all the work into it.
I’ve never had any wish to be an actor or to be on stage or anything like that, but you do feel slightly robbed when people start reciting your lines.
Then you realise they are doing their job and your job is done.
■ The Commitments tour has now started. Visit thecommitments ontour.co.uk for ticket details