“The Ark got involved a year and a half, two years after I’d written the script. “My knowledge of Roddy’s work was that whenever it had transposed to either the stage or the screen, he was the one who did it.”įoley’s instinct was that it would be a mistake to approach Doyle with a speculative idea and nothing to show for it, so he wrote the script and music, and made a demo of all the songs. “I did what no person would ever advise you to do, which is to write the whole thing on spec without any permission,” Foley says. For ages it was just him sitting in cafes, focused on the book he most loved as a child. He had neither a commission nor interest from a theatre.
“It was a cheeky thing to do,” Fionn Foley says of his decision to write a musical based on Roddy Doyle’s children’s book The Giggler Treatment.