Article published in The Scotsman, 25 March 2011.

Meeting sculptor and playwright Jimmy Boyle

I walked in to an Edinburgh bookshop recently and could have bought scores of different books on the Krays and their henchmen.

I could have bought 30 different books on Adolf Hitler but couldn’t find a single one on Mother Theresa and they only had one copy of Gandhi An Autobiography on the whole four floors. On television, you can see Waking the Dead, Wire in the Blood or Midsomer Murders or tune in to the eight-part drama-doc, Scottish Killers just after Corrie on Monday nights. Our culture is saturated with violence and we seem to love it. Theatres with flagging box offices have always programmed The Scottish Play – Shakespeare’s homicidal king shifts tickets like there’s no tomorrow.

In 1977 The Hard Man by Tom McGrath and Jimmy Boyle was packing them into theatres around Scotland. But this was no exercise in Grand Guignol. This semi-autobiographical play about the early life and subsequent imprisonment of Boyle, ‘Scotland’s most violent man’, was a theatrical game-changer. It was the Black Watch of its day. Imagine Scum meets The Threepenny Opera meets Goodfellas, staged in a music hall and underscored by Charlie Mingus, a play with the heart of Men Should Weep, the soul of Allen Ginsberg and the rage of Sarah Kane.

The play propelled McGrath to national stardom but gave fresh impetus to journalists for whom writing shrill opinion pieces in the Scottish press about Boyle had become something of a cottage industry. Tales of ‘drug-fuelled orgies’ in the Special Unit of Barlinnie Prison, where Boyle was held, led for calls for a daring attempt to reform the most dangerous prisoners in Scotland to be abandoned.

It also gave rise to a new raft of gothic folklore in Glasgow about the eponymous Hard Man – the gangster who was speaking to them from behind the walls of Barlinnie prison – who had, it was said, cynically manipulated the mind of McGrath and sought to nefariously corral public support for an early release so he could go back to nailing people to their floorboards. It was all rubbish, but why let the reality spoil everyone’s fun? Either way you couldn’t get a ticket for love or money.

In preparation for directing the first professional revival of the play, I made plans to meet Jimmy at his home in Morocco. I learned quickly that everyone has a story (which is always relayed with total conviction of its veracity) – a tale from an uncle, who had a mate, who had done time with Jimmy in the 1960s; or from a father who had sat behind Jimmy at the pictures one night and could just tell that he had ‘something about him’. The stories fell in roughly two camps – the bloodcurdling and the ‘he wusnae f***ing hard thut yin, you come here son, I'll tell you about real hard men’, invariably followed by something bloodcurdling. The only story I have heard twice is the one about nailing debtors to their floorboards in cruciform – but I also heard that story about the Krays and Al Capone.

When I arrive at the hotel that Jimmy has recommended for me, I am greeted by an expat landlady who tells me I should expect to have a great time with Jimmy. I have been upgraded for free to the best room in the place, ‘anything for a friend of Jimmy’s’. Over tea and cake she asks how I know Jimmy and I say I don't, but have come to discuss his play. She didn't know he’d written a play, she says, but adds that she’s heard Jimmy has ‘a bit of a past’, but has never thought to ask about it.

Jimmy’s driver picks me up at one o’clock, and on the way to the house he tells me how Jimmy helped him to pursue his studies and that he thinks of him as a ‘very great man’. I have brought a bottle of wine from duty free and, as requested, all the Sunday papers from the airport.

And then I meet Jimmy. He has just come from his studio where he’s working on his latest sculpture. He’s wearing a pair of flip-flops and an old grey T-shirt. As we shake hands I get a flash of those piercing blue eyes. We sit on his balcony under an African sky, taking in the Atlas mountains.

Jimmy asks why I am here. I tell him I always try to meet writers whose work I am directing, that I find it helped to get a sense of why they wanted to write the play and to get further insight in to the mechanics of the drama. This is basically true, but there is a part of me that wants to see the ‘Hard Man’ in the flesh. ‘What do I want him to be,’ I ask myself, ‘Why am I here?’

He talks with great openness about his life. There is not a jot of pride or relish in his stories or even a sense of self-justification. Most of them I know from his autobiography, A Sense of Freedom – but it’s one thing to read about someone being naked in a cage, that measured four feet by four feet by seven feet, for six and a half years, and quite another to hear it being related by the man who has lived it. He speaks of being almost completely desensitised to all aspects of pain and violence. He speaks of the warders and the inmates never talking to each other and the two groups living side by side in huge fear of each other – locked in a cycle of violence and retribution. He speaks of his own violence while inside in purely practical terms, as a way of surviving. He talks of the importance of staying free in his mind. I have to constantly remind myself that when Boyle was sentenced to life in 1967 for a crime he claims he didn’t commit, he was 23 years old. He went to the cages at 25.

Jimmy speaks about the Special Unit, and how quietly influential this controversial experiment was within the Scottish prison system. The unit was run as a collective, the inmates and the guards spoke to each other every day.

By speaking and listening to each other, understanding grew, trust grew and the inclination to hurt someone with whom they had an affinity diminished. He felt that they had begun to crack the problem of recidivism.

The only time I see a glint of steel in his eye is when I make a flippant remark about a production of mine that I wasn’t been terribly proud of. ‘Ah well, it’s only a play,’ I say.

’It’s never “only a play”,’ he replies. Art saved Jimmy. He underwent a spiritual and political awakening after reading Crime and Punishment – a tale of a young man’s redemption after committing senseless acts of violence – while in the cages at Inverness. Jimmy had never read a book before but here, he thought, was a writer who knew him – that very fact affected him deeply. But it was when he was given clay and encouraged to sculpt in the Special Unit that he felt the floodgates open. Suddenly he had a means of expression and his life took on a new purpose.

I ask him how he feels about us doing the The Hard Man again. ‘I don’t want you to take this the wrong way,’ he says after a pause. ‘I’m pleased you’re doing it, I think it’s a good play, and I wish you well with it. But to be honest I don’t care. That was my life then. I’m only concerned about now, the future, my next sculpture.’ It makes total sense. I feel bad for intruding.

His play reminds us that arguments about the punishment of criminals are general and abstract when applied to other people, but must feel very specific when applied to you. After the 2008 banking crisis it poses interesting questions about how different groups are criminalised and punished. It probes the cult of knife crime among young working-class men and how they are treated by the state. The play doesn’t say that Johnny Byrne – McGrath and Boyle’s semi-fictional central character – is innocent, or even that he is good, just that he is a man who was brutalised, who brutalised others, who in turn brutalised him. To what extent he is a hero and what extent he is a bastard is entirely up to you. Boyle and McGrath don’t seek to apply a conventional narrative to the violence – it happens and it destroys individuals, relationships and institutions. In the shocking final moments of the play Byrne is reduced to the status of an animal, living in a cage. We know that, given the opportunity, the real life Byrne was able to change his circumstances.

But more than anything I think the play is interested in why we have such an insatiable appetite for violent stories; why we repeatedly create ‘Jimmy Boyles’ in the popular imagination. Even though the real one is now sitting by a lemon tree thousands of miles away contemplating his next sculpture.


© Phillip Breen