'The pub was the one place men could socialise'

Two men sit at a bar, drinking Guinness and putting the world to rights.

The setting, though, is not a Dublin pub - but Coventry's Belgrade Theatre, where Roddy Doyle's play Two Pints is part way through its first-ever UK run.

The Irish writer - known for novels including Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha and The Commitments, for which he wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation - uses the play to explore themes of ageing and friendship.

"They drink, but they're not drinking to drink," he said. "They're drinking for each other's company, really. That's what it's all about."

Two Pints was first performed in 2017 in, appropriately, a pub in Dublin, before embarking on a tour of watering holes across Ireland.

He wrote it soon after his father's death.

"The plot was inspired by the experience of visiting the hospital to see him, and dreading it," Doyle explained. "Wanting to go, but dreading it.

"So the rhythm of that time – visiting the hospital, going up for the last time to say goodbye to him, and then the funeral – is the plot of the play, really."

The experience made Doyle reflect on the way men - especially men of a certain age - confide in one another.

"[I realised that] people, particularly men, will often open up if they're walking side by side rather than facing each other.

"It struck me that that was like being in a bar."

While admitting to "liking a good pub", Doyle is not trying to make light of the dangers of alcohol abuse.

For Doyle, the pub has a long tradition of bringing people together.

"When it came to two men of my generation meeting, there was no choice," he said. "It was the pub or nowhere. It was the one place men go.

"It's respite, isn't it, from life.

"Respite and withdrawal, from, I suppose, the trickier parts of life, the anxieties.

"Just for a while."

Much has been made on social media of the creative swearing employed by Doyle's barstool philosophers, and, indeed, the Belgrade warns potential audience members of "some strong language".

But Doyle insists it is not gratuitous.

"I examine every word," he explained. "And I try to make sure that is is something that those characters would say. It's part of the rhythm of the speech of working class Dublin people, and a lot of Irish people.

"I'm not saying it's a good thing or a bad thing, but it is what it is."

Like much of Doyle's work, Two Pints focuses on the lives of working-class Irish, told largely through nothing more than dialogue.

But his hope is that his work - from The Commitments to Two Pints - has an international appeal.

"Groups of young people coming together to express themselves musically is a universal story, isn't it?" he said. "And the same with this one.

"Men growing older together, and finding comfort in each other's company, is a universal story."

Two Pints is being performed at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, until 24 May.