John Tiffany on Once: 'You want to make sure it’s a version for now'
Multi-award winning musical Once finally makes its Scottish debut as a centrepiece of Pitlochry Festival Theatre’s new season. Director John Tiffany talks to Mark Fisher about getting the original creative team back together and why he won’t be messing with the production’s fragile beauty
When John Tiffany was invited to direct the stage adaptation of Once, the low-budget movie by John Carney, he immediately thought of Enda Walsh as writer. He had known the playwright since 1997 when Disco Pigs was a Fringe hit at Edinburgh’s Traverse. Tiffany thought Walsh’s Dublin upbringing would make him an ideal candidate to retell the bittersweet love story of a busker on the cusp of giving up music and the Czech woman who believes in him.
At the time, Walsh mentioned it to the film director Paweł Pawlikowski who offered these wise words: ‘That will be like catching a butterfly’. Good advice for Walsh. And for Tiffany too. In 2026, keeping that butterfly alive feels all the more of a delicate task. Fourteen years ago, Once was a massive hit for Tiffany and Walsh, along with songwriters Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, as well as movement director Steven Hoggett. On Broadway, it won eight Tony awards, including one for best musical. In the West End, it won two Oliviers. It’s the only musical to have received an Oscar, a Grammy, an Olivier and a Tony.
Now, Tiffany is reuniting the original production team to restage Once as the opening show in Alan Cumming’s inaugural season at Pitlochry Festival Theatre. He knows it would be ruinous if he tinkered with what made it work in the first place. As one critic said, this was a show that ‘wins you over with its simplicity, charm and air of sweet melancholy’. Tiffany is not about to make it complicated. ‘You want to make sure it’s a version for now,’ says the director. ‘But you also have to protect the person that made that show. There is a place that it came from in your heart that made it work and you’ve got to be sure you know what that is before you start playing with it.’
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Much has changed since 2013 when Once first played in London. Thanks to the pandemic, the touring version never made it to Scotland, so this will be its premiere up here. Tiffany went on to direct the West End crowd-puller Harry Potter And The Cursed Child and, last year, he staged another musical, Wild Rose, at Edinburgh’s Lyceum. Going back to Once is a chance to root himself. ‘It’s just heaven,’ he says. ‘Martin Lowe, the music director, said the show always comes into your life when you need it. There is an innocence about Once, a real analogue purity.’
From the start, he knew this was not the kind of story that usually made it to Broadway. It was quiet and low-key, not brash and brassy. It was never going to be about high-kicking chorus lines. ‘It would have suffocated the story, the characters and the beautiful fragility of what Glen Hansard, Markéta Irglová and John Carney created,’ he says. ‘I’m the wrong director for that kind of traditional Broadway spectacle and I wouldn’t have known where to start.’
With Dylan Wood and Lydia White taking on the roles played on screen by Hansard and Irglová, Tiffany is focusing on essentials. From its very earliest incarnation at the American Repertory Theatre, this was a show that needed no more than six tables and 12 chairs, with actors playing their own instruments. The sound design is more complex than it looks, but the power is in the direct audience engagement. ‘Once feels to me like not just a musical, but a story about the healing and transforming power of music.’
Once, Pitlochry Festival Theatre, Saturday 23 May–Saturday 27 June; main picture: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan.