An interview with Roddy Doyle for Bibliographies.Online

Roddy was in Australia for the Sydney Writers Festival. We kicked off with a quick look at the bibliographies.online Roddy Doyle pages including an image of an annotated copy of The Commitments (annotated by Roddy for a PEN International fund-raiser in 2022):

MW: On the first page you wrote “There’s no formal title page because I didn’t know what a title page was”.

RD: Well, that’s true, yeah. Although I’d been reading books all me life I don’t think I’d ever paid much attention to those early pages with copyright. I wasn’t aware that there was a tradition of the title page. So, when we were designing, it was just a few people, it was self-published in Dublin in 1987, I don’t think any of us were aware that there should be a title page. So, it was only when I became formally published that I realised, or I took notice of that fact “Oh yeah, every book has a title page”.

MW: And on the back of the title the copyright.

RD: I was a stickler for that alright. Tried to make sure that we got that. Going back now we had no online help. Just going by what we could see and making sure it was formally legally properly done. But the title page got missed.

MW: And you even registered an ISBN.

RD: Which would probably take about ten seconds now but was a bit more complicated back then.

MW: That was a humble start.

R. It was a great start actually. It was brilliant. I wouldn’t want it any other way. Students of mine are on the cover. I’m still good friends with two of them who are in their late 50s now. It was a great adventure in ways. A friend of mine designed the cover, another friend took the photograph of the band and the one of me…friends proofread the book with me and got it, you know, they realised it was a bit unconventional. So, they weren’t correcting that that shouldn’t be corrected. Everything about it was a great adventure, and I think even if it hadn’t been published in London and then in other places around the world, I’d still look back on that and be happy that I’d done it, you know. Rather than let the manuscript rot under the bed.

MW: It was one of those life’s achievements where you say, “I did that”.

RD: No, I think you only have those at the end of your life. I don’t think I was thinking that way. That old bucket list nonsense. I didn’t see it as a life achievement at all. It was just…I was in the company of other people who were very, very creative and weren’t waiting for grants from the Arts Council ‘cos they weren’t going to get any. Or weren’t waiting to go through the formal route and they were just taking over parish halls and making them into theatres. There was one pair of men, very, very good friends of mine, and they’d set up a theatre company and it was great. It was really brilliant.

MW: Was the theatre company The Passion Machine for whom you wrote two plays?

RD: I did indeed, yeah. Brownbread and War. And they were put on in a place called the SFX Centre which had been the Saint Francis Xavier Hall in an inner-city parish in Dublin. It was being managed by a really good friend of mine who co-published the book with me, John Sutton. And around about the same time as the plays were going on and the book was being published I was going to gigs there – REM, The Clash, The Pretenders, Billy Bragg, Echo & The Bunnymen, The Pogues – great, great gigs. So that link between theatre, books, gigs, all seemed perfectly natural. Throw in a bit of football and it was a perfect world.

MW: This was in 1987?

RD: The book came out in the Spring of ’87 and the first play, Brownbread, came out in September.

MW: I saw on the cast list of those two early plays Brendan Gleeson.

RD: Yes. Brendan, like myself was a teacher, and another playwright who founded The Passion Machine, Paul Mercier…we were all teachers. Paul was in the same school as me and Brendan was in a similar type of school up the road. So, the rehearsals were at night. Virtually everybody involved had a day job. There was a taxi driver in the cast, couple of teachers, graphic designer, a few professional actors – guys who were just trying to make a living out of it.

MW: Brendan Gleeson turned up again in The Snapper when it was made into a film.

RD: Yes, Brendan’s in The Snapper. All these things happened in the 80s and 90s. I’ve done a few films since but there wasn’t a role in it for Brendan. There were a lot of projects that Brendan could have been in and would have been great if he had been in, never quite made it onto the stage or the screen. It’s one thing I’d love to have is some sort of an opportunity where Brendan could play a good meaty role in something that I’d written. Maybe he’d like that too. But having said that, Colm Meany is in the films and Colm is brilliant, just brilliant, and Liam Cunningham wasn’t in my plays but was in The Passion Machine plays and he became something of a household name because of Game of Thrones years later. Liam was an electrician – that was his day job.

MW: Only recently I watched Family and then The Snapper followed by The Van. It started to get confusing as in Family Ger Ryan who played Paula Spencer turns up as Bimbo’s wife in The Van.

RD: I suppose it’s because the pool of actors in a small country isn’t huge. The director of The Van, Stephen Frears, would’ve seen Family and would, quite rightly, have been very impressed by Ger’s depiction of Paula. So, she got the part.

MW: But also the daughter in Family was later the daughter of Colm Meany in The Van.

RD: Yep, Neilí Conroy. Again, she was brilliant in Family so “give her the part!”. I don’t think we had in mind at the time somebody watching them all again 35 years later!

MW: It’s the same situation in Australia with a smaller pool of talent.

RD: Yeah. I remember that great phase going into the art house cinema in Dublin to watch all these brilliant Australian films and seeing the same people. Being delighted and sitting up when an actor that made you sit up in the last film walked on and you said “Ah, this is going to be good!”.

MW: You have written quite a few plays since those early ones and while I was compiling the bibliography I came across one written for RTE radio, Two Men Meet.

RD: Yeah, little half hour thing. It was done in conjunction with Amnesty. The notion of plays that address some social issue, social problem, and I was asked would I do one. I readily said I would, but I was reluctant because in a way I think it’s putting the cart before the horse. The issue before the characters. But I thought of a situation where two men meet and deliberately it’s on Dollymount Strand…so immediately it’s “What’s this about”…and it’s a father and a son and the father’s behaviour earlier on in their lives was really poor, really bad, and the son has reluctantly agreed to meet him but isn’t going to let him get away with it. I can’t give you an analysis as I haven’t thought of the play in a long, long time, but it won some sort of award. Great cast, just the two people, the two men. The reason I know it won an award is because years later I was in RTE to do an interview. I was waiting a few minutes, and they had a big cabinet full of awards and as I was looking in it I saw there was one awarded to me. They never told me. It was actually quite funny as there was somebody with me and I was able to point, “See that!” (laughs).

MW: You’ve also done some adaptations. The Government Inspector.

RD: Great experience.

MW: The Playboy of the Western World.

RD: Yep. Less brilliant experience. The writing of it was great. The Government Inspector came about after The Playboy of the Western World. A woman called Aideen Howard, artistic director at the Abbey Theatre, was keen that I would do something that would somehow be inspired by the collapse of the economy. You know that Ireland had gone off a cliff really, and initially I thought – you know the movie It’s A Wonderful Life – if we could do some sort of a stage version set in Ireland in the present day. This bank collapsing, and let the bank be a metaphor for the country. There’d be a lot of laughter and a lot of that good sentimentality that’s in It’s A Wonderful Life, a lot of referring to the angel, Clarence, and he’d be on a bridge at the Liffey and he’d have a Dublin accent. You know, I could see it happening but getting the permission, getting the rights to do it was impossible. We had to give up, it was so complicated. It was based on a short story and the script for the film had been written by several different writers. So, it was like, as they say, trying to herd cats at a crossroads. It was just impossible. So, Aideen’s idea then was that instead of that do The Government Inspector and it was kind of perfect because the IMF had been called into Ireland. So, this guy is arriving in the town…and it was great fun ‘cos I kept all the names, I kept all the scenarios but they’re Irish lads called Luka Lukich and Anton Antonovich…it was directed by Jimmy Fey…it had a good run in The Abbey.

Before that I’d done Playboy of the Western World. I co-wrote it with a Nigerian writer who was living in Ireland. A fella called Bisi Adigun and Bisi had an idea that the 100^th anniversary of the first production of The Playboy, which was 1907 when it caused a storm, caused a riot – literally a riot, was coming up and he thought it would be a good idea that Christy Mahon, the young lad who comes into the village telling people that he’d killed his father and he becomes a local legend – that instead of him coming from just another county in Ireland he’d be from Nigeria. It reflected what was happening – so that’s what we did. We went through the original play line by line and we wrote the whole thing to be set in a pub in the West of Dublin in 2007. The writing, I can’t remember how long it took but I devoted the Tuesdays and Thursday of my working week and Bisi would come to my office. So, the writing was very satisfying, and I learnt a lot from him about key words, important dietary things, how to write a Nigerian – or two Nigerians ‘cos his father arrives. And I think probably he, because I was more experienced, leant a lot from me. Very much every line was a negotiation, really satisfying. Then it went on at The Abbey and things went haywire – the production was very good, really very, very good – but I don’t want to go into much detail, ‘cos it’s kind of boring but there was a major falling out between myself and Bisi and he served me with three high court writs and it went on for years. He served The Abbey with a write and worst of all he served the director, Jimmy Fey, with a writ. So, the day came, the first time I’d been in the court, first time I’d been involved in that sort of thing at all, and it was settled. I wasn’t involved in the settlement; I just had to agree to it. It was between Bisi and The Abbey. It was quite embittering at first and I recognised it as embittering and tried to rid myself of that as quickly as possible. I’ve had no dealings and no contact with him since.

The play itself was great, but I had decided early in the dispute that whatever the outcome I was going to give him the rights to the play because I didn’t want anything to do with it anymore. There’s been a few small productions elsewhere though I don’t know anything about them, but there was a lot of interest and it could have been huge.

MW: The curious thing is that Playboy, other than those two early Passion Machine plays, is the only one to have been published.

RD: Is The Playboy published?

MW: Yes. Published by Syracuse University Press.

RD: Ah, well that’s Bisi’s doing. I’ve never seen that, and I don’t care. I literally don’t care.

MW: You’ve had a number of other plays that have been staged over the years but you’ve never published the texts.

RD: The Snapper, which is a stage version that I wrote, there’s amateur productions. Amateur theatre is a huge thing in Ireland, and generally there’s some sort of production going on all the time. It’s great.

MW: But where do they get the text from?

RD: That’s a good question…I have a play called Two Pints that’s in the omnibus edition.

MW: The Complete Two Pints.

RD: That’s the last thing I did, I think.

MW: Peter Pan? (Roddy wrote a version set in Dublin)

RD: Peter Pan hasn’t been published. When I’ve finished something I just put my head down and get back to work. Nobodys suggested that it be published and it’s not on my list of things that must get published but I was very happy with it.

MW: When I was putting together the bibliography for the website I thought there’s a lot of work here and yet not available for people to sit and read.

RD: I can understand that. For myself I can remember when I was a very young lad reading everything by Sean O’Casey and even though I’d never seen a play of his at that stage I was reading them all. I donated my archive to the National Library in Dublin, but I told them at the time that I’m not going to go out of my way to put in notes in the hope, or whatever, that somebody’s going to be poring over them in 10, 20, 40 years’ time. So, I give them what I had and I feel a little bit of the same thing…yeah, if somebody suggested it would be a good idea to publish Peter Pan I may well get round to it eventually. Maybe if there’s another play…put several together. I get your point, but when I get home my concentration will be on finishing the last draft of the novel so I can have it out next year.

MW: And is that still the most important thing for you – the next novel.

RD: I think on my passport and other documents I’m down as a writer. It’s a broader thing than author. But if I had to pin it down and you were told you could only choose one I’d put novelist, because if I’m not actually writing a novel I’m thinking about one. Generally, there’s another idea brewing. The other work, as long as it’s stylistically,  and everything else, different, I can work on two projects at the same time. But virtually everything else I’ve done, Peter Pan for example somebody asked me to do, the Two Pints play somebody suggested it, The Snapper the theatre company suggested it. Family, which is probably my best non-novelistic piece of work, I think, was the BBC – they got in touch with me. Whereas the novels, they’ve always come from myself. I can’t recall anybody suggesting “Well it might be good if you wrote about this”, and if it was suggested like that I’d ignore it.

MW: You’re also a prolific writer of short stories.

RD: I wouldn’t say prolific.

MW: I counted forty-seven, and that’s the published ones I could find.

RD: I do know, and it came as a bit of a shock – you know last year was the 100^th anniversary of The New Yorker. There was an event in Dublin and myself, Ann Enright, Colin Barrett were there, and there was a list of the Irish writers. Top of it was people like William Trevor, Maeve Brennan, Edna O’Brien – you know, revered names, but of the living writers I was really taken aback, it was me, I have published more stories than anybody else in The New Yorker. But you said forty-seven…I’m really quite surprised. I wouldn’t have thought it was that many.

MW: You had all those early stories in Metro Eireann.

RD: Yeah, The Deportees.

MW: You also had a lot of stories in McSweeney’s and The New Yorker.

RD: Yep, and then there were some that just went straight into the books, and various other magazines as well.

MW: There’s a lot of uncollected stories.

RD: Some of them were just…I’m betting if I went over through them there are some that don’t merit being put in. There are others that’re strange. There’s one that’ll be coming very soon. It’s in a new little book of ghost stories and that’s its rightful place. I don’t know whether years down the line and I’m gathering up stories for a collection whether I’ll think it’s a good idea to take that one as it is a ghost story, so it stands alone.

MW: Last year you chaired the Booker Prize judging panel. How did you find needing to read that many books in a limited amount of time compared with your normal amount of reading?

RD: Well, the easiest way to say it was “there was more of it”. I generally wake at about 6 in the morning, go downstairs, make a cup of coffee and read for pleasure for a few hours –   there’s only two of us in the house now – but before the world gets going. I’ve been doing that for years, and if I’m going to my office in the city centre I bring a book and read it on the bus, and if I’m going for a bit of lunch I read. So, I’m constantly reading. But this time round I just had to abandon my writing career for the guts of a year and read, read, read. And the way I was reading was different as well. I’m reading a novel by Hisham Mattar at the moment and savouring sometimes the paragraph and going back and reading it again, doubling back to remind myself of the name of a character. I wasn’t doing that for the Booker Prize. I was just going straight ahead, straight ahead, and if I was getting a bit confused I felt that’s the writer’s problem, not mine. And literally letting books drop over me shoulder and picking up the next one. No bringing the dog for a walk, although I tried to do that as well.  It was relentless, but having said that, knowing it wasn’t the rest of my life, it was just once off, I really enjoyed it. The other judges were fantastic and we’re still in touch with one another. We’ve a book club which is really just an excuse to meet up for an hour or two every month or so to say hello and see how we’re getting on. But they were lovely and they were great and the Booker staff were brilliant as well – a great mix of nice and efficient, and it’s quite often the two don’t go together. So, it was brilliant, it was really, really good. If I’d just been a judge I’d have probably said no because I’ve judged a lot over the years, but I just thought the challenge would be the Chair and I really enjoyed the experience. It suited my personality. It reminded me a lot of teaching although there were only five adults in the room and they were all there voluntarily and none of them were coming up with excuses why they didn’t do their homework. It was a nice feeling because I really did like being a teacher. So, it was all hugely satisfying but I wouldn’t do it again.

MW: You obviously love books and love reading but how do you feel about the physical object of a book?

RD: Ah, I love a good book. I really don’t like the very small font and I think to save the planet some of the publishing companies have been shrinking their proof copies. They’re really quite horrible at times to read, you know. And particularly if the writer, it’s a stylistic thing and it’s perfectly valid, writes long paragraphs – there was one book and it was just one long paragraph, which is absolutely fine but tricky enough to read, but when the font is too small…I just love the physicality of a book. I’m quite content enough to read on a Kindle or an iPad though I do like the feel of a book and I do like paperbacks particularly. I prefer them to hardbacks. If I have a new book out myself and the post arrives and it’s the first copy of my new book in hardback, and it’s a big moment in any writer’s life, and it never gets any less big. If it’s a really special writer I’ll buy the hardback, rather than wait until the paperback comes out. But I really love a good paperback.

MW: Have you ever felt the need to buy a special edition of a book such as a first edition?

RD: I’m not big about first editions. I have, obviously, first editions of my own but I’m not fussed. It’s the contents of the book. With a paperback you know it’s in rag order literally by the time I’m finished with it. I’m not carefully opening it, so it’ll remain a thing forever. I have a copy of Moby Dick, an American edition of Moby Dick, with woodcut illustrations, but it fell apart. I have it up on a shelf with an elastic band, although that’s probably totally corroded…or whatever the word is.

MW: The Guardian has recently published their revised list of the 100 Novels of All Time. What would be your Top 3 ?

RD: It’s tricky. There’ll always be a place for At Swim Two Birds by Flan O’Brien. I did see Ragtime by EL Doctorow is in the Top 100 and that’ll be one for me. And I think possibly Great Expectations. But I could look at that list again and say “Sorry, I meant…”, but Dickens definitely, something by Dickens.

• with Mark Warner in Sydney, Australia – 22^nd May 2026

(click to enlarge photos)