I tell you what. If you go to Billy Roche's The Wexford Trilogy, leave your heart at home in a box where it will be safe. Otherwise it will break. The only link between A Handful Of Stars, Poor Beast In The Rain and The Belfry is that they are set in Wexford town.
Based around the weekend of the All-Ireland hurling final, Poor Beast In The Rain is my favourite. Set in a betting shop, you've got the girl behind the counter, the young feller who's absolutely besotted with her, the older mouth who's always trying to give everyone advice, and a character called Danger Doyle who's coming back from London because he ran off with the mother of the girl who works behind the counter. The great quality in Billy's work is that he finds the epic in the mundane. There is always a melancholia about his work but that is worked in with an almost Frank Capra kind of human sympathy. It is the collision of the comedy and tragedy in Billy's work which makes it so unique.
I remember when I was writing my play The Weir, saying to someone, "Am I just going to be called a Billy Roche rip-off?" But at the same time I didn't care. He showed me what it's possible to write about. And it was great fun working with Billy as an actor recently on my film Saltwater - although as a playwright I have to say he didn't really stick to my lines! He is also a remarkably driven man. He looks like one of his plays. In the same way that John Osborne says Beckett looks like one of his plays.
Billy's plays aren't produced as frequently as they were when they came out in the early Nineties. So I'm thrilled that this is going to place him back at the centre, where he belongs.
