The Hard Man @ King's Theatre

Scotland’s tradition of groundbreaking literary experimentation suffered a great loss with the recent death of Tom McGrath.

He is best known for his play The Hard Man, a piece that draws much of its material from the young life of Jimmy Boyle. Credited as a co-writer, Boyle’s experiences when seen through the prism of McGrath’s innovative theatrical devices made for a play that was to have a lasting effect on Scottish theatre.

Controversial and shocking on its premier in the seventies, the text has lost none of its relevancy. Director Phillip Breen has the job of translating this text to the modern theatre. ”Whenever I do a classic play, I feel my job is to recreate for an audience the impact that it had on the first night,” he says, explaining that “The context has changed and it’s all the better for it,” allowing us distance from the close relationships that the text had with real life.

McGrath’s examination of society’s preoccupation with imposing fixed narratives on the chaotic nature of reality, and reductive identities on figures such as Boyle, is what makes it continuingly relevant. In his introduction to the text, Breen expresses how “2011 [is] a fecund time to explore the play”. With the internet allowing us greater contact with one another, boundaries created by the notion of ‘the other’ are rapidly being demolished. As Breen says, “Johnny Byrne’s sardonic spoken leitmotif, 'the animal is thinking' [has] and increasingly sonorous resonance.”