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ANOTHER FINE MESS From gangland Gorbals to Hollywood slapstick, the work of the late Tom McGrath is being celebrated in two biographical theatre productions, finds Mark Fisher
Alex Ferns is in two minds about his new role. Or it could be his new role is in two minds about him. It’s because he is playing Johnny Byrne in The Hard Man, written jointly by Tom McGrath – jazz man, counter-culture poet and sometime heroin user – and Jimmy Boyle, the convicted Glasgow gangster turned sculptor. As he gets his head round the part, he can’t help but hear the voices of these two very different writers competing for his attention. ‘Sometimes there’s a clash and that makes it exciting,’ says Ferns, best known for bad-boy roles such as Trevor Morgan in EastEnders. ‘You can feel the rawness of Boyle and then you’ve got the lyrical, other-worldliness of McGrath.’
The part
is
of Byrne heavily autobiographical, an unguarded reflection of Boyle’s life growing up in the Gorbals and graduating from playground thug to gangland murderer – even if he always claimed innocence for the killing of William ‘Babs’ Rooney that earned him a life sentence in 1967. Ten years after his imprisonment, having discovered his artistic muse in the special unit of Barlinnie prison where he wrote his autobiography A Sense of Freedom, Boyle hooked up with McGrath to write The Hard Man. It was described by The Financial Times in 1977 as the ‘most moving play of the year’.
In its own way McGrath’s life was scarcely any less remarkable. Born in Rutherglen in 1940, he was a key player in the 1960s underground. He graduated from being features 110 THE LIST 31 Mar–28 Apr 2011
editor of Peace News to founder editor of counter-culture bible International Times (IT). By the time he started writing letters to Boyle, he had returned to Scotland to kick a two-and- a-half year heroin habit, had set up the Third Eye Centre in Glasgow and had been musical director on The Great Northern Welly Boot Show by Billy Connolly and Tom Buchan. ‘It’s amusing to think of McGrath, being slightly podgy and overweight and bumbling, meeting this trimmed-down ultra-fit hard man,’ says Ferns. ‘The two of them being able to collaborate at all is fascinating.’
‘YOU CAN FEEL THE RAWNESS OF BOYLE AND THE OTHER- WORLDLINESS OF
MCGRATH’
Their combined backgrounds meant The Hard Man is no ordinary bio-drama. Rather, it is a violent, high-octane piece of theatre that just happens to be influenced by jazz, improvisation and poetry. ‘The first half is very stylised and cartoon-like and pays homage to all the Cagney movies,’ says Ferns. ‘In the second half, which is set exclusively in the prison when he’s doing solitary, it gets darker. It’s very musical – we have a percussionist who punctuates the entire play – and the language is
very Glasgow – the jargon, the musicality of slang – and there are some really interesting moments almost written in blank verse.’ Directed by Philip Breen, the production is commissioned by the Scottish Theatres Consortium and coincides with the launch of the Tom McGrath Trust, a fund to support artists developing their craft, set up in memory of the playwright, who died in 2009. By a further happy coincidence, Mull Theatre is reviving its production of Laurel and Hardy, McGrath’s loving evocation of Stan and Ollie, at Glasgow’s Citizens. First seen in 1976, a year before The Hard Man, it is a second example of McGrath at his lyrical best.
‘He was a writer’s writer,’ says actor and director Alastair McCrone, who has played the part of Stan Laurel six times in the last 23 years. ‘Tom was originally a poet and this is a kind of a poem to Laurel and Hardy. It is so rhythmic, the whole thing has such an internal rhythm. The words are beautiful. There’s only one real prose scene in the whole thing. The poetry is not absolutely obvious – what you see is a piece of theatre – but what we as performers have is a sense of rhythm and it’s obvious to us if we get out of step with that rhythm. That’s testament to Tom as a poet.’
The Hard Man, King’s Theatre, Edinburgh, Thu 31 Mar–Sat 9 Apr; King’s Theatre, Glasgow Tue 12–Sat 16 Apr; Laurel and Hardy, Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, Wed 27–Sat 30 Apr.