SOUL SURVIVOR
First it was a book. Then it was a film. Now it’s a stage musical. Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments is currently packing them in at London’s Palace Theatre and any notion that a piece of work that first saw the light of day a quarter of a century ago might have become a little, well, whiskery along the way, is emphatically contradicted by the raw energy flowing from stage to auditorium.
It’s a simple-enough story. Jimmy Rabbitte from Dublin’s poverty-stricken Northside is a young man on a mission. He wants to put together a group of local musicians specialising in the sort of soul music emanating from black America and watch as they become the most famous band in Ireland. Patrick Lonergan, Professor of Drama, Theatre and Performance at the National University of Ireland in Galway, applauds Doyle’s creation in general and the fictional Barrytown in particular.
‘It’s based,’ he says, ‘on suburbs like Ballymun, a working-class community dominated by tower blocks, which soon became an icon of drugs and deprivation.’
This is why it’s easy to understand, according to Lonergan, how The Commitments find such passion in their music. ‘Every note they play, every note they sing, is a deliberate reaction against an environment that offers them nothing. The band take enthusiastically to soul music precisely because they’re living in a country that seems to have sold its soul.’
The Commitments was Roddy Doyle’s first book, written in 1986 and self-published a year later. (He went on to win the Booker Prize in 1993 with Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, the tale of a 10-year-old Dubliner and his merry band of scallywags.)
It was met with a mixed reaction, to say the least. ‘The music press didn’t like it,’ recalls Doyle. ‘I think they felt I was invading their space somehow.’
Then there was a distinctly hostile review in a publication called Hot Press. The £5,000 that Doyle had borrowed from the bank to see his work in print looked as though it was unlikely to make a return on the investment.
But help was at hand. Elvis Costello, who lived in Dublin at the time, countered the hostile review with an endorsement that changed the book’s fortunes. ‘If you want to know what it was like being in a band when I was a kid,’ he wrote, ‘just read The Commitments.’ That did the trick.
‘It became something of a cult,’ says Doyle, ‘and eventually led to the book being published in the UK.’
Some of the criticism directed towards the book centred on the author’s liberal use of four-letter words. Did he ever consider writing the story minus the profanities?
He smiles. ‘No,’ he says, ‘because then it would have been reduced to the size of a pamphlet.’
The stage musical is similarly replete with bad language, but two things mitigate in its favour. Within about 30 seconds, you become inured to the repetitive use of the F-word and, anyway, given the milieu inhabited by the principal players, it simply wouldn’t ring true if they didn’t pepper each exchange with meaningless swear words.
Doyle certainly had a rich seam of experience on which to draw when he wrote the original book. ‘As a teacher, I was in daily contact with hundreds of different people. I taught English and I’d ask my pupils to talk quite a lot of the time; in fact, stopping them was the main challenge. When I began writing, I realised I’d always enjoyed listening to conversations; not eavesdropping, but actually listening to what people say.’
Anyone familiar with Doyle’s work will know that his dialogue sings off the page. Indeed, the way his books are presented, they almost have the appearance of a script. His latest, The Guts, was published in August and it treats the reader to the latest chapter in the life of Jimmy Rabbitte.
He’s 47 now, married with four children and, as the story opens, dealing with a recent diagnosis of bowel cancer. If that sounds unremittingly grim, you have reckoned without the author’s sometimes laugh-out-loud wit. Warm and poignant, the book is about friendship and family, about facing death and opting for life. You will laugh and cry, sometimes on the same page.
It is also, like its predecessor, a book located very deliberately in an urban setting. Thirty years ago, when he first started writing The Commitments, most of the fiction to come out of Ireland, says Doyle, 55, was rural. ‘A lot of it was set in the countryside on farms featuring silent fathers, repressed violence and a dominant Catholic church. But I was a Dublin man, somebody who grew up in a city and I wanted to reflect that.’
He also consciously wrote what he hoped would be a comedy. ‘It was about a band, so it doesn’t touch on life or death issues. You can say music is life or death to you, but it’s not. Music is fantastic, but this is a story about young people coming together, having some success and breaking up. That’s not a tragedy. In fact, it’s perfectly healthy in many ways because you know they’ll re-form in different bands.’
Despite the film’s success, which was released in 1991, it was years before someone suggested it would transfer well to the stage. Doyle had a series of meetings with potential scriptwriters, ‘but after a while, I found myself answering the questions I was asking [of these people] and at the end of one meeting, I thought, “I’ll do it myself.” I went home and told my wife, Belinda. She just looked at me and said, “You took your time”.’
So, has he pulled it off? Patrick Lonergan certainly thinks so. ‘As the new stage adaptation shows,’ he says, ‘this story is not just about the past, but also about our world today. Dublin in the 1980s was a place where money, hope and happiness all seemed scarce, but it was also a place where music could be genuinely inspirational. The Commitments shows that, when people work together, they can find a power they never knew they had: the power to make something beautiful, the power to create great music and sometimes the power to imagine better ways of living.’
Certainly, Jimmy Rabbitte in Denis Grindel’s performance radiates unquenchable optimism. An actor making his West End debut, he has what Simon Cowell calls ‘likeability’ in spades, even if he wasn’t always quite clear (to me, at least) courtesy of the thickness of his accent and his tendency to shout. But he remains at the epicentre of the action and it’s all the better for it.
Directed with plenty of pace by Jamie Lloyd – recently lauded for his production of Macbeth with James McAvoy – The Commitments is noisy, funny and sometimes rather touching. And the singing is rather good, too. It’s tricky to be presented with a ragtag of singers and musicians and watch them develop into a more than halfway decent band in no time at all. But, between them, Doyle and Lloyd achieve just that.
The songs help, too – everything from You Keep Me Hangin’ On and Knock On Wood to I Heard It Through The Grapevine and What Becomes Of The Brokenhearted? As in the film, the vocals are enhanced considerably by the three girl backing singers led by the comely Imelda (Sarah O’Connor). The trumpet playing of the yes, horny Joey (Ben Fox), who may or may not have played with The Beatles, Marvin Gaye and so on, is also impressive.
But the one who catches the eye – and ear – is the borderline psychotic Deco whom Jimmy first hears singing at a party, blind drunk. Deco has no recollection of this and yet, when he grabs the microphone, it’s clear he has the voice of an angel and the lungs of a lumberjack.
Killian Donnelly lets you know from his first entrance that he’s running on an extremely short fuse. It is the performance of the night and the reason, above all others, why the predominantly middle-aged audience is on its feet for the rousing finale of a loud but likeable evening.
Runs until 26 January 2014 at the Palace Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, London W1: 0844-412 4656, www.thecommitmentslondon.com
It’s a simple-enough story. Jimmy Rabbitte from Dublin’s poverty-stricken Northside is a young man on a mission. He wants to put together a group of local musicians specialising in the sort of soul music emanating from black America and watch as they become the most famous band in Ireland. Patrick Lonergan, Professor of Drama, Theatre and Performance at the National University of Ireland in Galway, applauds Doyle’s creation in general and the fictional Barrytown in particular.
‘It’s based,’ he says, ‘on suburbs like Ballymun, a working-class community dominated by tower blocks, which soon became an icon of drugs and deprivation.’
This is why it’s easy to understand, according to Lonergan, how The Commitments find such passion in their music. ‘Every note they play, every note they sing, is a deliberate reaction against an environment that offers them nothing. The band take enthusiastically to soul music precisely because they’re living in a country that seems to have sold its soul.’
The Commitments was Roddy Doyle’s first book, written in 1986 and self-published a year later. (He went on to win the Booker Prize in 1993 with Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, the tale of a 10-year-old Dubliner and his merry band of scallywags.)
It was met with a mixed reaction, to say the least. ‘The music press didn’t like it,’ recalls Doyle. ‘I think they felt I was invading their space somehow.’
Then there was a distinctly hostile review in a publication called Hot Press. The £5,000 that Doyle had borrowed from the bank to see his work in print looked as though it was unlikely to make a return on the investment.
But help was at hand. Elvis Costello, who lived in Dublin at the time, countered the hostile review with an endorsement that changed the book’s fortunes. ‘If you want to know what it was like being in a band when I was a kid,’ he wrote, ‘just read The Commitments.’ That did the trick.
‘It became something of a cult,’ says Doyle, ‘and eventually led to the book being published in the UK.’
Some of the criticism directed towards the book centred on the author’s liberal use of four-letter words. Did he ever consider writing the story minus the profanities?
He smiles. ‘No,’ he says, ‘because then it would have been reduced to the size of a pamphlet.’
The stage musical is similarly replete with bad language, but two things mitigate in its favour. Within about 30 seconds, you become inured to the repetitive use of the F-word and, anyway, given the milieu inhabited by the principal players, it simply wouldn’t ring true if they didn’t pepper each exchange with meaningless swear words.
Doyle certainly had a rich seam of experience on which to draw when he wrote the original book. ‘As a teacher, I was in daily contact with hundreds of different people. I taught English and I’d ask my pupils to talk quite a lot of the time; in fact, stopping them was the main challenge. When I began writing, I realised I’d always enjoyed listening to conversations; not eavesdropping, but actually listening to what people say.’
Anyone familiar with Doyle’s work will know that his dialogue sings off the page. Indeed, the way his books are presented, they almost have the appearance of a script. His latest, The Guts, was published in August and it treats the reader to the latest chapter in the life of Jimmy Rabbitte.
He’s 47 now, married with four children and, as the story opens, dealing with a recent diagnosis of bowel cancer. If that sounds unremittingly grim, you have reckoned without the author’s sometimes laugh-out-loud wit. Warm and poignant, the book is about friendship and family, about facing death and opting for life. You will laugh and cry, sometimes on the same page.
It is also, like its predecessor, a book located very deliberately in an urban setting. Thirty years ago, when he first started writing The Commitments, most of the fiction to come out of Ireland, says Doyle, 55, was rural. ‘A lot of it was set in the countryside on farms featuring silent fathers, repressed violence and a dominant Catholic church. But I was a Dublin man, somebody who grew up in a city and I wanted to reflect that.’
He also consciously wrote what he hoped would be a comedy. ‘It was about a band, so it doesn’t touch on life or death issues. You can say music is life or death to you, but it’s not. Music is fantastic, but this is a story about young people coming together, having some success and breaking up. That’s not a tragedy. In fact, it’s perfectly healthy in many ways because you know they’ll re-form in different bands.’
Despite the film’s success, which was released in 1991, it was years before someone suggested it would transfer well to the stage. Doyle had a series of meetings with potential scriptwriters, ‘but after a while, I found myself answering the questions I was asking [of these people] and at the end of one meeting, I thought, “I’ll do it myself.” I went home and told my wife, Belinda. She just looked at me and said, “You took your time”.’
So, has he pulled it off? Patrick Lonergan certainly thinks so. ‘As the new stage adaptation shows,’ he says, ‘this story is not just about the past, but also about our world today. Dublin in the 1980s was a place where money, hope and happiness all seemed scarce, but it was also a place where music could be genuinely inspirational. The Commitments shows that, when people work together, they can find a power they never knew they had: the power to make something beautiful, the power to create great music and sometimes the power to imagine better ways of living.’
Certainly, Jimmy Rabbitte in Denis Grindel’s performance radiates unquenchable optimism. An actor making his West End debut, he has what Simon Cowell calls ‘likeability’ in spades, even if he wasn’t always quite clear (to me, at least) courtesy of the thickness of his accent and his tendency to shout. But he remains at the epicentre of the action and it’s all the better for it.
Directed with plenty of pace by Jamie Lloyd – recently lauded for his production of Macbeth with James McAvoy – The Commitments is noisy, funny and sometimes rather touching. And the singing is rather good, too. It’s tricky to be presented with a ragtag of singers and musicians and watch them develop into a more than halfway decent band in no time at all. But, between them, Doyle and Lloyd achieve just that.
The songs help, too – everything from You Keep Me Hangin’ On and Knock On Wood to I Heard It Through The Grapevine and What Becomes Of The Brokenhearted? As in the film, the vocals are enhanced considerably by the three girl backing singers led by the comely Imelda (Sarah O’Connor). The trumpet playing of the yes, horny Joey (Ben Fox), who may or may not have played with The Beatles, Marvin Gaye and so on, is also impressive.
But the one who catches the eye – and ear – is the borderline psychotic Deco whom Jimmy first hears singing at a party, blind drunk. Deco has no recollection of this and yet, when he grabs the microphone, it’s clear he has the voice of an angel and the lungs of a lumberjack.
Killian Donnelly lets you know from his first entrance that he’s running on an extremely short fuse. It is the performance of the night and the reason, above all others, why the predominantly middle-aged audience is on its feet for the rousing finale of a loud but likeable evening.
Runs until 26 January 2014 at the Palace Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, London W1: 0844-412 4656, www.thecommitmentslondon.com