The Hard Man, Kings Theatre, Edinburgh

Theatre critic

Monday 4 April 2011

Mira Opalinska may need to coach her musicians in the art of the collective bow in acknowledgement of audience response.

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Neil Cooper

As seen through the figure of Gorbals gangster Johnny Byrne, what emerges in the first half of Phillip Breen’s production is a music-hall sketchbook of cartoon dead-end kids and choreographed violence counterpointed by old time dancehall classics as Johnny and his gang take over the neighbourhood. All this is punctuated by out-front monologues that point up the links between crime and economic disenfranchisement, with a pair of gossipy wifies making up a back-street chorus.

After such a stylistic whirlwind, the second act’s stark change of pace highlights the tedium of Johnny’s incarceration, as it focuses on his own brutalisation. Out of this comes a sense of enlightenment he could never find on the mean streets in a voyage of discovery at odds with the cage he’s in.If some of the play’s didacticism dates things, it’s more than made up for in terms of energy and bravura. Alex Ferns in particular is possessed with a ferocious urgency as Johnny, who moves from wild-eyed thug to a near Buddah-like deity. There’s strong support too from Nicky Elliot and Iain Robertson as Johnny’s feral henchmen, while Stewart Porter plays a series of chilling enforcers on both sides of the law.It is driven along by off-stage percussionist Chris Wallace, whose jazzy rhythms take a more ritualistic turn as Johnny’s mind opens to a world of possibilities. The final image of Johnny, naked and covered in his own excrement, is of angry defiance in a violent world.

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The Hard Man, Kings Theatre, Edinburgh

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