Paul Howard: 'What I learned From making Anglo The Musical'

In 2012, before the opening of Anglo the Musical, Paul Howard had to see a solicitor "to get an opinion about whether I could go to jail."

"Anglo the Musical was facing a contempt of court issue. It wasn't contempt of court when we wrote it because there weren't charges in the Anglo case at that stage. But everything changed.

"The DPP were sending us letters saying they were concerned about it and Sean Fitzpatrick's lawyers were sending us letters saying they wanted to see the script . . . By then the theatre was booked and there were buses driving around town with 'Anglo the Musical' on the side and we'd already sold tickets."

“The preview show was on Tuesday and on Monday night, I was on the way to Cashel to do a reading for the Tipperary book festival and I got a phone call to say the DPP were demanding changes to the script. This was the night before the preview. These were wholesale changes: “We want you to drop the end of act one” – the end of act one was pretty important! It was a big number and they said “this implies criminality” and it could influence the trial. Of 14 scenes, two scenes had to go completely and any scenes with the Anglo boys talking to each other had to be completely stripped, so that when they actually got to the stage there was no point to the scene.

“At the time the DPP was concerned about the implication in the script that Anglo were the only bank involved in profligate lending. Our solicitor suggested working in a few mentions of other banks being at that carry on as well. So we did.

“I got home from Cashel at midnight and my wife Mary had an enormous pot of coffee waiting for me and I sat down and rewrote the show and had half an hour sleep, went into the theatre and we gave new scripts to the actors, after four weeks of rehearsal expecting them to learn new lines and cues.

“So the actors were learning these new lines and I hadn’t really slept in 24 hours and around two and a half hours before the preview I’m sitting there opposite this girl. I hadn’t really looked at what she was doing. I realised that she had a ruler and she was going through 500 programmes with a ruler and a black pen redacting the name of songs that had been taken out. Everyone had a moment when they had a meltdown. That was my moment. I just said ‘I can’t do this.’

"I was due on Matt Cooper [to do an interview] and was in no fit state to go on. I rang Mary, she just said to me, go somewhere and drink some gin. So I went into a quiet corner and had a glass of gin and got my head together and did the interview.

“We were told that if they didn’t make the changes they would be closed down. In fact the lawyers for the DPP and the Anglo people didn’t turn up to the preview, they went to the opening night. If they had come to the preview there wouldn’t have been an opening night, because a lot of the jokes stayed in just because the actors were too far down the road. . . Then on the opening night there were all these people taking notes in yellow legal pads.”

“[Over that time] I lost about a stone in weight, wasn’t sleeping, wasn’t eating. I was walking around like someone out of a David Lynch movie. In photos from that time I just look white and gaunt.”

What did he learn? He laughs. “Don’t crack jokes about events that are soon to be the subject of a trial. It was a really mad, ridiculous time.”

Read Patrick Freyne's full interview with Paul Howard in Monday's Irish Times and here on irishtimes.com

Paul Howard's new book Keeping up with the Kalashnikovs is published by Penguin Ireland on the 11th September at €14.99