Introduction to the 2011 edition of The Hard Man by Tom McGrath and Jimmy Boyle.
The Hard Man: ‘On Violence...’
After the huge and unexpected success of his first play, Laurel and Hardy in 1976, Glasgow playwright Tom McGrath was asked by the Traverse Theatre what his next play would be. ‘It’s going to be about violence,’ he said. He was asked for a title; he quickly made one up. ‘It’s going to be called The Hard Man.’ McGrath was concerned with his home city’s fetishisation of violence, and its prevalence in its working class culture. He had become fascinated by the violence in the work of Laurel and Hardy and began to imagine what the films would be like without the laughs. Or only with the violence.
As he worked away on ideas and sketches for his new play, he began an extraordinary correspondence with one of Scotland’s most notorious hard men, Jimmy Boyle. Boyle was an inmate at the special unit at Barlinnie prison, serving a life sentence for murder; a crime he claimed he did not commit. The correspondence between the two formed the basis of the powerful and influential play-cum-bloody cabaret The Hard Man. It changed the life of McGrath and the face of Scottish theatre. It was the Black Watch of its day. It was popular, challenging and contemporary. It was a theatrical game-changer. Imagine Scum, meets The Threepenny Opera, meets Goodfellas staged in a music hall and underscored by Charlie Mingus. It’s got the heart of Men Should Weep with the soul of Allen Ginsberg and the hairstyle of Jonny Rotten. It paved the way for Trainspotting, and shares a purpose with Sarah Kane.
The story is a fictionalised account of Boyle’s young life. From his days as petty criminal, through numerous stretches in brutal young offenders units, in to organized crime, money lending rackets, notoriety, arrest, imprisonment, more brutalization and a bloody battle-royale with the prison guards at HMP Peterhead. The play was derided in some quarters for adding lustre to the reputation of a violent criminal and convicted murderer. For others the play represented an attack on the corrosive influence of gang-culture. For others it was a poetic meditation on state violence and the question of who is criminalized and how they are punished. For others the play represented the rage of the indefatigable human spirit against the madness of the system – a Gorbals One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. The politics of the play continue to be provocative in their ambiguity.
The play is complex, stylised and difficult to pin down; but it reflects the truth of our protagonist’s ‘version of his own story’ on a deeper level. It’s expressionistic, it seizes the essence of life without its context; as Tennesse Williams said of his own expressionism, ‘it’s a closer approach to truth’. Its structure owes a lot to McGrath’s love of jazz, it freewheels like a Charlie Parker sax solo, but always returns effortlessly to the main theme. Its demotic language is rich with turns of phrase recalled from Boyle’s childhood in the Gorbals. The synthesis of the two gives us a play of startling originality.
When I first read The Hard Man two and a half years ago, I was swept up in its energy, frankness and jet black working class wit. Its zoetrope of violent imagery lodged in my brain like splinters of glass. It appealed to the adolescent in me that loves gangster films, the child that loves pantomimes, and laughing at dirty jokes. It appealed to the part of me that is curious to know why we are fascinated with violence and its perpetrators; the part that is riveted by Silent Witness and Macbeth. The part of me that questions why I can check my phone while watching far off cities get bombed on the news.
The more I read it, the more I felt that 2011 was a fecund time to explore the play. The end of 2010 saw Manchester United’s Rio Ferdinand campaigning for action to stop kids killing each other with knives in Peckham and the strangling of a young woman in Bristol. It saw Wikileaks reveal how British prisoner abuses at Abu-Ghraib has led to the radicalization of thousands of young Iraqi men, creating a foothold for Al-Qaeda where there was none. It saw millions being paid in compensation to former inmates of Guantanamo Bay. In each case ‘them’, ‘the others’ suddenly became people who had names and feelings and spoke on Newsnight. Johnny Byrne’s sardonic spoken leitmotif ‘the animal is thinking’, had an increasingly sonorous resonance.
There is a theme of debt in the play too, which felt deeply contemporary. This is expressed on a figurative and moral level, as the actors who play the characters that Byrne betrays in act one return in the guise of his jailers and tormentors in act two. But the issue of working class debt and the problem of what happens when people have no-recourse to ‘legitimate’ credit is tackled head on also. Johnny Byrne says:
‘I was providing a social service ... I’d been prepared to do business with them when you hadn’t. While you were sitting back pretending not to notice I had been there to care for their needs. My methods with defaulters were quick and to the point but they weren’t any different from your precious world just a bit less hypocritical and undisguised. Let’s face it the whole world is a money lending racket and if it takes a man’s whole life to kill him with his debts it doesn’t make it any the less an act of murder’
The juxtaposition of moral law with written law and the troubling gap between the two is of profound interest to McGrath and Boyle. As is the issue of who society deems to be ‘criminal’. It was perfectly legal for banks to sell mortgages to people who couldn’t afford to pay them back. The illegal sale of toxic debt remains largely unpunished. Bankers continue to receive their bonuses, and the banks are bailed out to the tune of thirteen trillion dollars in the US and counting. Tony Blair started what many believe to be an illegal war and gets £1million per gig, speaking on leadership. Brutal prisons the world over, are crammed with the mentally ill and addicts of all kinds who do not have powerful friends, or happen to disagree with their government, or who had the misfortune to deal in sums society could comprehend.
The British government attempted to have Jimmy Boyle sentenced to hang in 1967 for a murder charge that was eventually thrown out of court. His actions in prison, as far as he was concerned, were purely a practical matter of surviving the actions of a state that had physically and sexually assaulted him in his teens and at the age of twenty-three tried to rush through a flawed conviction that would have seen him dead. However the shadow of Jimmy Boyle doesn’t loom as large over the play as it did in 1977. Maybe we are more able, with distance, to dispassionately consider the fictional character of Johnny Byrne and hear the play’s jagged poetic rhythms and its passionate polemic on its own terms.
The play doesn’t say that Byrne is innocent or even that he is good, just that he is man who was brutalized, who brutalized others, who in turn brutalized him. To what extent he is a hero and to what extent he is a bastard is entirely up to you. He was reduced to the status of an animal, living in a cage, caked in his own shit. We know that after the shocking final moments of the play, given the opportunity, the real life ‘animal’ was able to change his circumstances. Although the special unit that did so much to change Boyle’s life was closed down in 1994. Between 1996 and 1998 eight inmates committed suicide.
The play reminds the audience that arguments about the punishment of criminals are general and abstract when applied to other people, but very specific when applied to you. It’s fine to punish ‘them’, ‘they’ deserve it, ‘they’ have broken the law, ‘they’ deserve everything that’s coming to them. ‘They’ have a name. ‘They’ are not going to disappear.
© Phillip Breen