Fionn Foley on adapting Roddy Doyle’s The Giggler Treatment: ‘I did what no person would ever advise you to do’

“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. He had neither a commission nor interest from a theatre. For ages it was just him sitting in cafes, focused on the book he most loved as a child.

“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. “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.”

Foley’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.

“The Ark got involved a year and a half, two years after I’d written the script ... I was shopping it around a little bit, because I felt the best way to get an approach was with a theatre on side rather than me saying, ‘Hey, Roddy, how’s it going?’ – that it wasn’t just an envelope fecked on to his desk, that the right people would vouch for it.”

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It paid off. Aideen Howard, director of the Ark children’s cultural centre in Temple Bar in Dublin, liked the script. Most importantly, so did Doyle.

First published in 2000, The Giggler Treatment continues to find new fans. Gigglers are little creatures who look after children by following them around to make sure the adults are not being mean to them. When they see a child being treated unfairly, the adult in question gets the Giggler treatment – poo on their shoe. Gigglers maintain their supply by buying it from dogs. (Nice work if you can get it, pooches.)

Foley’s pet peeve when it comes to musicals are those that adapt a successful piece of work simply to squeeze more money from its intellectual property. “The musical is not warranted; there isn’t any inherent kind of musical language in the piece,” Foley says. “With a good musical the source material suggests itself.” For him, a musical is naturally a wildly nonlinear form, despite the fact that it has to be tightly structured.

“There is something anarchic about music, because essentially the story is that for some reason somebody will choose to express themselves for eight or nine minutes musically. There’s something inherently fantastical about that,” Foley says.

[ ‘It’s radically different’: Behind the scenes of Roddy Doyle’s Dublin Peter Pan ]

The Giggler Treatment had always suggested itself to him as wonderful source material for a musical. The book introduced Foley “to the idea that a story does not necessarily need to go from A to B, and the narrator does not necessarily need to be reliable, and the whole idea of seeing a story through a 100 different prisms, and putting it together in a really fun way”.

Is there a danger that, in choosing to adapt a book you love, the process of bringing it into the world might break your intensely personal relationship with it? “I think the ship has sailed,” Foley says, laughing. “I’ve been living and breathing it for a few years, on and off. But what is really nice, I think, is that it’s been developed and brought into this new iteration through an original fan of the book when it came out.

“It feels like a very nice continuation. Ultimately what I’m doing with this is what I always heard in my head, and saw in my head, while reading it. It’s very evocative in terms of its imagery. I don’t think I’m just expanding upon my initial approach to the book or my initial enjoyment of the book. It doesn’t really feel like we’ve pivoted and tried to make it something that it’s not, because I always felt it was something that existed in musical terms.”

It is a cold, wet afternoon when I sit in on a rehearsal, but the room is bright and lively. The show’s choreographer, David Bolger, is plotting out dance moves to a song with the help of its musical director, John O’Brien. The cast – Leo Hanna, Shauna Harris, Leah Kavanagh, Anne O’Riordan and Michael Tient – hold Giggler puppets.

The show, which is produced by Kelly Phelan, is billed as suitable for ages four and up; a conversation between Bolger and Sophie Motley, the director, about whether it is the humans or the Gigglers leading a particular action illustrates how complex storytelling to such a wide age range is. The puppets are communicating with the children, the actors more so with the adults, yet everything must work seamlessly together. And the puppets need to have personalities to connect with audiences. “Let’s make it massive,” Motley says during one routine. “Because we can always make it smaller.”

Foley is determined not to be a back seat driver during rehearsals. “I’m nothing more than the writer at this point,” he says. “Everything that I want should be on the page or on the score, and if it’s not, that’s my fault. If you trust the people in the room, ultimately the only thing that can happen is they can add to it. They breathe new life into it.”

Foley describes himself as “a classic Jack of all trades but master of none”. He studied theatre and drama at Trinity College Dublin, and in 2021 he was chosen for the Irish Theatre Institute’s Six in the Attic programme, which provides participants with the space, time and resources to make new work.

There is not an obvious ecosystem for new Irish musical theatre, Foley says. “You have to work outside the rules as they are, rather than within them.” He was in bands in his teens, yet it is only in recent years that he “got into the actual mechanics of music and arrangement”. His last show, Tonic, was produced by Rough Magic for Kilkenny Arts Festival and Dublin Fringe Festival.

“It’s a medicine show about a travelling family band at the end of the world who are distributing this miracle tonic that’s going to save everyone from the effects of a cataclysm, with one member of the band secretly using it as a vehicle to revive his failing career in the country-folk scene,” Foley explains.

“It’s about taking a band in 2047, at the grimmest point of their careers and lives, and actually finding joy in that, and finding reasons for perseverance and silliness. And having a sophistication to the silliness as well.” He pauses. “My raison d’etre is to do something incredibly stupid in a very impressive way.” (As reasons for existing go, this strikes me as a particularly fine one.)

Some years ago the Ark began to invite local primary schools in on Fridays to watch work-in-progress performances. Being able to test elements of the show with sample audiences is a huge benefit.

“They would have fairly didactic feedback!” Foley says. “But they seem to have a real loyalty to it as well. They’d be very discerning about their favourite bits being kept in, and the integrity of [the book] being as they remember it, which is lovely. A lot of people who make work for children would say the same thing – that it’s really important not to dumb anything down, not to make it babyish. The clarity of course is very important, but clarity should be important in any work.

“The main difference here is that you will get complete disengagement if you don’t have that. I think of the audience that we’re playing to as being all that more discerning. You really can’t let the ball drop at any point, because you will pay for it. You will hear it!”

At the rehearsal, the cast rehearse a song with the refrain “Be honest with your children or the Giggler treatment just might be waiting for you!” It is so enjoyably ear-wormy that I found myself humming it days later. “It’s a joy to be playing to a younger audience at a time where the world is just so confusing and grim,” Foley says. “You have to feel for kids trying to make sense of it. So to be able to do something around Christmas with a story that’s ultimately joyful ... That’s really all I’m interested in.”

The Giggler Treatment, which is suitable for ages four-plus, opens at the Ark, Dublin 2, on Friday, December 1st, and continues until Sunday, January 7th, 2024. The run includes performances for schools, ISL interpreted performances, and relaxed performances