Roddy Doyle under the lens

Roddy Doyle under the lens
The Barrytown Trilogy
Michael Cronin
(Ireland into Film Series) Cork
University Press/Irish Film Institute
2007 ?10 ISBN 9781859184042
When Dave from Eejit Records turns up
at a Commitments concert, one of his first
comments in the novel is ‘very visual’. So
what happens then when Roddy Doyle’s
novels in the Barrytown Trilogy are turned
into the ‘visual’ in Alan Parker’s The
Commitments and Stephen Frears’ The
Snapper and The Van?
Prof Michael Cronin, who lectures in
the School of Applied Language and
Intercultural Studies at DCU, in his new
book, The Barrytown Trilogy, explores the
dynamic and intriguing interplay between
text and film in a crucial period that will
witness dramatic changes in Irish society. In
his pioneering study, the first study of the
film versions of the Doyle novels, Cronin
shows how Parker and Frears along with
Doyle allow a whole section of Irish society
not only to be seen but also to be heard on
screen and in so doing challenge a range of
conventional pieties on Ireland and its
representations in cinema.
If authors like John B. Keane and Pat
McCabe have had their work transferred to
celluloid, there have probably been few
contemporary Irish writers who have been
so closely identified with the enterprise as
Roddy Doyle. Indeed, for some, the real
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Angeline Ball (Imelda Quirke), Maria Doyle (Natalie Murphy)
and Bronagh Gallagher (Bernie McGloughlin)
plot in Roddy Doyle’s work has been the plot on cinema itself. In an interview with
Liam Fay in Hot Press published in 1993, Roddy Doyle expressed his surprise at the
peculiarly Irish form of begrudgery which saw his writing as essentially a
cynical manoeuvre to seduce Hollywood moguls: ‘There was all this stuff about
how I had written The Van with a view to selling it as a screenplay, that it wasn’t a
novel at all and that I had my eye on the Hollywood market. Leaving aside the
actual content of the book – two middle-aged men with a chip van – it was
still baffling.’

“ There was
all this stuff
about how I had
written The Van
with a view to selling it
as a screenplay,
that it wasn’t a novel
at all and that
I had my eye on
the Hollywood market.
Leaving aside the
actual content of the book
– two middle-aged men
with a chip van –
”
it was still baffling.
Doyle is right to be sceptical about
the motives of his more malign critics but
he should be less baffled that his work is
associated with an artistic practice that
has been an integral part not only of the
lives of characters but of his own activity
as a writer.
In his study, Cronin concentrates the
high point of that activity, namely the film
versions of three novels which constitute
the Barrytown Trilogy, and which
appeared as The Commitments (1991), The
Snapper (1993) and The Van (1996). Taken
together, the novels and the films constitute
a crucial body of work that
not only give voice to the particular
preoccupations of the recent Irish past but
remain startlingly contemporary in the
manner in which they articulate the
specific relationship between Irish locality
and global futures. Cronin shows how the
films give rise to a new understanding of
Donal O'Kelly (Bimbo) and Colm Meany (Larry)
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place and identity in Ireland, and offers
crucial insights into the importance of
popular culture in reworking established
categories of identification and belonging.
Most importantly, Cronin
demonstrates how the films in the
Barrytown Trilogy can be viewed as part
of a project of generation and a crucible of
change. The films rather than being the
last chapters in a romance of loss penned
by the disaffected form the template for
the emergence of a new kind of Ireland.
The Commitments on stage. Bronagh Gallagher (Bernie McGloughlin), Angeline Ball (Imelda Quirke), Maria
Doyle (Natalie Murphy), Felim Gormley (Dean Fay), Johnny Murphy (Joey ‘The Lips’ Fagan), Kenneth
McCluskey (Derek Scully), Andrew Strong (Deco Cuffe), Dick Massey (Billy Mooney), Glen Hansard (Outspan
Foster)
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