Hard as Hell

Thanks to its own artists, Glasgow has an enviable reputation as the hard-arse city of Europe. When Cardiff was still a provincial outpost with only the odd Saturday night ruckus, and the Bull Ring in Birmingham a deserted shopping centre, Glasgow had gangs of gangsters chibbing each other on the Green, a drug war fought over ice cream vans, young teams giving it laldy around the Gorbals and an organised crime network that impressed the Mafia. From Edwin Morgan’s descriptions of homosexual rape to every single episode of Taggart ever, Glasgow is represented as the fightingest, the craziest, the nastiest city in the British isles. If the Grand Ole Oprey represents the west coast’s obsession with Americana, these mean streets have taken Dodge City as a role model.

And so to The Hard Man. Back in the day, Tom McGrath and Jimmy Boyle made a Brechtian version of the social realism that had led Scottish theatre since Men Should Weep had invented tenement tragedy: dealing with topics later to be popularised by films like Scum and Australian TV’s kitsch late night drama Prisoner Cell Block H, it took an incisive look at both the viciousness of the penal system and a fictionalised version of Boyle’s early life on the streets. Refuse to flinch at the unfairness of court justice, or sentimentalise the savagery of the city’s gangs, it remains an impassioned plea for understanding, never offering solutions but directly addressing the audience’s conscience. That there were a fair number of rammies in both acts added to the frisson.

However, what was shocking in 1977 is less so in 2011. The first act, which may have caused the initial complaints that the show glamorised violence, is predictable enough: a 1920s gangster movie plot set in 1960s Glasgow, it gives short shrift to any theories about the social circumstances that created Boyle (or Byrne, his “stage name”). A few trenchant comments about how his money lending business was a social service, since it helped out those people whom the establishment wouldn’t, a trio of female stereotypes (innocent mother, whore with a heart and the naive gangster’s moll) and a slow motion beating: director Phillip Breen brings out the entertainment innate in criminal rough and tumble. The second act, more thoughtful and claustrophobic hits home: Byrne’s prowling and posing is slowly reduced to a tiny cage, he is beaten, stripped and the breaking of the fourth wall is more consistent, achieving the necessary intimacy to present a series of perspectives – from a prison warder’s claim that he is merely a waste disposal operative for society and Byrne’s own reflections on the courts, prison and the human spirit.

Breen is right to identify the play’s continued social relevance – Glasgow still loves a tough guy, and the social breakdown that allowed Boyle’s thuggish business strategy is increasingly present. And Alex Ferns offers a tour de force as a criminal beginning to understand how he has been cheated and manipulated. The emphasis on period detail is a distraction: the chibbers and thieves are still at large, preferring shell to tailored suits: locating this drama in the past encourages a nostalgia, a sense of looking back at how things have changed. Yet theatre with a social conscience is due a comeback, and Breen is able to infuse McGrath’s political agenda with a rough edged energy.