‘It has become shorthand for a magical cultural experience’
The Thick Of It and Line Of Duty star Paul Higgins will star in a new one-man play based on This Is Memorial Device at this year’s festival.
He plays Ross Raymond, the character in the book who curates the interviews and stories of Airdrie’s post-punk movement – particularly Memorial Device. It runs nightly from Saturday.
Keenan said he never envisaged the book being adapted for the stage but says the result is mind-blowing.
“It’s interesting, I wasn’t sure how I would feel about it because I’m not a writer who has any interest in adaptations of my work,” he said. “I’m a novelist, these books are novels and they are finished as novels. People always say, ‘Maybe they’ll turn it into a TV show’, but who cares, it’s not a stepping stone to more success for me.
“There was a one-off performance at the book festival a few years ago, when I worked on the script with (writer-director) Graham Eatough and I absolutely loved it. I began to realise Memorial Device doesn’t belong to me anymore; everyone is their own Memorial Device. Everyone reads it differently, everyone sees their own memories through the filter of it, and has a different idea of what it sounded like and looked like, so I realised the book had to go into the wild.
“It’s exactly in the spirit of Memorial Device to have multiple tellings, because even in the book people tell contradictory stories about the same events, because that’s how people remember things.
“There’s a Memorial Device Twitter account with 34,000 followers and it has nothing to do with me. I don’t know the person behind it and have never met them, but they wrote to me early on and said it came from a love of the book.
“They are total fans, so I gave them my blessing. I have no say over it but they get it 100% and it has become a community of people.
“Memorial Device has almost become a shorthand for a magical cultural experience in growing up and having your world transformed by art. Seeing this cult and mythos built around the book slipping through my fingers and stepping off the page, in a way it’s what every writer wants, for the book to become real and to be out there in the world, changing and transforming.
“It’s absolutely beautiful and I’m so excited to see the play.”