Ross in the flesh

The once-monstrous Ross O'Carroll-Kelly has become warmer over the nine years since his inception - and now the satirical character is about to become fully human, writes Peter Crawley

He has been with us for nine years, from the moment he poured a few over-privileged, money-addled half-thoughts into the Diary of a Schools Rugby Player, to his ascendancy as a best-selling author and cultural phenomenon. But can you put a face to the name?

This is where Ross O'Carroll-Kelly now finds himself. The fictitious diarist, born the moment his creator heard one petulant Senior Cup rugby player loudly announce to his father, "I don't give a fock how you think I played, just crack open the wallet." Ross O'Carroll-Kelly began life as a satirical tool. (Tool being the operative word.) More acronym than flesh, he was, from the beginning, a grab-bag of middle-class slang and strangled phonetics - "The old man went spare, told me he won't give me the jammer for the pre-debs, which is loike a total downer, royt" - designed not so much to skewer middle-class Dublin as whack it repeatedly over the head.

Somewhere along the line, however, middle-class Dublin got the joke and took a shine to the goy. Now, countless columns and seven books later, Ross is about to take his first bow in Landmark Production's The Last Days of the Celtic Tiger, a show that quickly extended its run following brisk advance ticket sales, and for which corporate boxes are available that include a bottle of champagne. Such is the price of popularity and the curious validation by the people who, one feels, should be the butt of the joke. Whether or not they are alive to the irony, Paul Howard certainly is.

"I don't mean this in a trite way, but it does worry me the number of kids who almost take it literally," says Howard, who is as engaging, charming and prolific as his character is not. "They look on this as a guide to living instead of seeing it as ironic. Jonathan Swift said satire is like a mirror in which people see everybody else but not themselves. That's what it's about for me." He is half-amused and half-startled by the number of young fans who will say to him, "You're a total ledge!" - to the point that he wouldn't mind if Penguin put a parental advisory sticker on the book covers - but it's hard to tell whether he is equally alarmed by their acceptance.

"I've said it before, but when I started to write it, I had a lot of axes to grind. There's no point in denying that I probably had a chip on my shoulder about being working class - not an unhealthy one, you know - and there was a lot of score-settling going on for me. The last thing I expected was the people I was writing about to become the audience. They were the people whose skin I was trying to get under."

AGREEABLE, THOUGHTFUL ANDlively, Howard doesn't immediately strike you as the pugnacious sort. Just as he gleefully recalls the friction of his first book launch, held with an adjoining party of rugger buggers in Blackrock rugby club, he's equally fond of the memory of being interviewed on a transition year radio station at Blackrock College, where he received a guard of honour from the students on his arrival. Just as "royt", the linguistic punctuation of Ross's first column, gradually softened into his catchphrase "roysh", so Howard's creation has gradually softened into a something more human.

"I think what happened," he says, "was that the character became a little bit warmer. But it wouldn't have happened if I hadn't taken that decision to be a little bit more sympathetic to him. In the first two books, which I actually published myself, he was quite a hateful character, with no redeeming characteristics at all, I think. I kind of realised that if this was going to be a series of books, or if the column was going to run for a long time, people would have to feel something for the character. Every so often you have to open up a little chink of light and let people see that there is a soul in there. His heart isn't just for pumping blood around his body."

HOWARD'S OWN MODELfor this is Damon Runyon, the sports journalist turned humorist who also turned his observations into merciless phonetics and pointed caricatures. " Guys and Dollsis my bathroom book," says Howard. Recently an economics professor told him that he had "legitimised mindlessness" - "Which I'm quite proud of, really" - but you couldn't say the same about heartlessness.

In the more recent books for instance, Ross, whose class snobbery has always been borderline psychotic, discovered that he was the father to an illegitimate eight-year-old "skobie" son, his stereotypes not exactly challenged by the fact that Ronan is a one-man crime wave. Ross's mother, Fionnuala, has become a successful chick-lit author, inadvertently exposing the corrupt sources of his father's €57 million fortune, leaving Charles O'Carroll-Kelly to be imprisoned as a result and to have his assets seized. Ross's progress, then - from his inflated sense of self-worth and shameless sense of entitlement, through his rapacious attainment and, now, to his own economic downturn - is not just the tale of an arrogant and witless one-time kicker of a schools rugby team, but, essentially, the story of Celtic Tiger Ireland.

"I quite like him," Howard says, when asked about his feelings towards the character now. "I do. I did set out to hate him, but now I kind of feel like I'm with him. He's probably in some ways . . . " He hesitates. "A lot of the stuff he does, I kind of wanted to do. There's a huge amount of wish-fulfilment going on."

In Ross's contributions to the Sunday Tribune- and more recently to The Irish Times- Howard never took a byline, and even with the publication of the books he seems to play second fiddle to Ross's first-person. Did he ever feel eclipsed by his creation? "No, I never really felt it, you know. To be honest, it was half the fun. For the first two years no one knew who wrote it. There was all this speculation going round. We used to get calls to the sports desk saying, 'You've got to tell me who writes that thing. It's Drico. It's Ryle Nugent'."

When his cover was blown, Howard began to do public readings and pressure grew for him to perform the part. Radio shows still invite him to appear in character as Ross O'Carroll-Kelly. "That's like asking Roddy Doyle to come on as Charlo Spencer," says Howard. "I write the stuff, I don't act it. That's why it's kind of a relief to be handing the torch, so to speak, to Rory Nolan. Because he does the voice so much better than I do."

WHEN NOLAN WAScast in the part, he was told, by more than one person, "Oh my God, you're perfect for it".

"I didn't know whether to take it as a compliment," smiles Nolan. Strictly speaking, he isn't the first person to play the role (two years ago Risteárd Cooper gave voice to Ross O'Carroll-Kelly on the CD The Twelve Days of Christmas), but he is more closely aligned. They are both from south Co Dublin. They are a year apart in age (Nolan is 27, Ross is 26). They both played rugby in school - Ross, spectacularly, for the barely fictitious school Castlerock; Nolan, less spectacularly, for CBC Monkstown ("We were pretty brutal," he confesses). Before training at the Gaiety School of Acting, Nolan also attended UCD (Nolan, unlike Ross, actually graduated), which gave him "a great observation deck for Ross, because you see facets of the character left, right and centre. The accent, in particular. But as an actor performing the piece you want to go beyond the accent. One of the challenges is to create a fully rounded, believable character . . . albeit, he's not the deepest fish in the sea. Hopefully I'll have something there."

Nolan is aware that he can never be everyone's model of Ross. "You're stepping into a character who lives in the imagination of thousands and thousands of people, which is pretty daunting and exciting at the same time." But Nolan not only fits with Howard's perception of the character - he even finds similarity between Nolan's broad features and those of the Alan Clarke cartoon illustration that accompanies the column - he has also become Howard's model for Ross since rehearsals began. "When I'm writing Ross O'Carroll-Kelly now," Howard says, "I think of Rory. And the same with Lisa as Sorcha" - Ross's on-again, off-again girlfriend and, latterly, wife. "Lisa played Sorcha in The Twelve Days of Christmas. Ever since she did that, now Lisa is Sorcha in my mind. For the first time, when I'm writing the characters, I have a picture of who they are."

Some may worry that, with his words made flesh, Howard will go softer still on his character, or, now that Ross has afforded him such success (Howard gave up full-time journalism 18 months ago to concentrate on novel-writing), it may dull the edge of his satire. The script was not made available before the opening of the show. "If you saw the script today, it doesn't compare to the script we had two weeks ago," explains Howard. "And by the time we open, it will have changed a lot again."

"Look, it's not Beckett," he adds. "It's a sitcom really. It's a sitcom on the stage. I didn't have any long dark nights of the soul." With his experience of public readings, Howard knows that what works on the page may not work on the stage, and has lately become something of a student of sitcoms, watching them for structure, the mechanics of their jokes, even measuring the seconds between punchlines.

"The classic model for me would be Will & Grace," he says, a little disturbingly. "You know, it's not everyone's cup of tea, but I love it." How this will infuse the play is hard to tell - all Howard will allow is that it takes up where the last book left off, with the imprisonment of Ross's father, but that it will not leave an indelible stamp on the ongoing narrative: Characters will act according to type, there will be no reversals or redemptions, and, just like The Simpsons, the slate will be wiped clean by the end.

But do The Last Days of the Celtic Tigerspell the last days for Ross O'Carroll-Kelly? "I don't think this is the end," says Howard. "I kind of have this number in my head. It started off as a trilogy, and now I'm on the seventh book in the trilogy. I always said I'd stop when I got bored with it, or when the people got bored with it. Actually, I did think that the time to stop was five years ago. Then it got popular . . . And that's a terrible thing."

• The Last Days of the Celtic Tigerpreviews at the Olympia from Nov 8, opens on Nov 12 and continues until Dec 5