Thirty years on, John Byrne adds to his trilogy the Slab Boys with the further adventures of Phil McCann & Co
BY BARRY DIDCOCK

IT'S 30 years exactly since John Byrne and Phil McCann first clapped eyes on each other and said their hellos. Over the subsequent decades life has given them both the odd smack in the kisser, but through it all they have remained firm friends, though of the sort that bicker and bitch and scrap. Byrne is now 68, McCann is there or thereabouts, and they still look eerily similar.

There is one difference between them, of course: John Byrne is real, Phil McCann is a creature of the pen and the brush, a fictional character lent life by Byrne's skill as a dramatist and as an artist. And what a character!

He appeared first in Byrne's 1978 play The Slab Boys as a gobby teenage apprentice working in the design studio of a Paisley carpet manufacturer in 1957. He popped up again in Cuttin' A Rug (1979), also set in 1957, and we last caught sight of him in Still Life (1982), which begins in the winter after the Summer Of Love and ends five years later with McCann sloping off into the distance with the gorgeous Lucille on his arm. Today Byrne's tragi-comic trilogy is probably Scottish theatre's most celebrated cycle of plays, Phil McCann one of his best-loved creations.

Now McCann is back for a fourth instalment in a new work called Nova Scotia, set in the early years of the 21st century. So is Lucille, and so is another old friend - George "Spanky" Farrell, a fellow design studio inmate who formed a rock band in the late 1960s, moved to California and hasn't stepped off the tour bus since.

"I was trying to write a different play, one about an architect, a guy who runs a micro-brewery and someone who comes back form America," Byrne explains.

"I was thinking up the names of the characters and then these bastards all gatecrashed it, these buggers called Phil and Spanky. And then I couldn't get them out my head. They more or less told me they wanted to be in the play which would be about them.

"That sounds fanciful - I used to laugh when I heard people say the characters just took over' - but it's true."

We're sipping spinach and wheatgrass drinks in an Edinburgh juicery down the hill from the rehearsal space in which Byrne, director Paddy Cuneen and the Nova Scotia cast are making the final tweaks to the play. So much for the script. But just as Byrne has had to imagine what Phil and Spanky have been up to for the last 30 years for the sake of his narrative, so too has he had to imagine what they look like. Byrne has aged; so has McCann, the character he so closely resembles. I ask him how McCann appears to him now. A little worn around the edges, he replies.

"You always get a shock when you look in the mirror because you're much more grizzled. So Phil is more grizzled. Spanky seems less so. He's been living in America and doing the same thing for 40 years, but as you can testify from bands like Nazareth who are still on the go, that's perfectly feasible."

Byrne drew Phil and Spanky, both now in their 60s, as soon as he began writing Nova Scotia. "I re-imagined them visually straight away," he says. "I do find it much easier drawing them." I ask him if he would find it difficult to write a play without drawing the characters, without giving them that extra dimension to their fictional lives.

"I wouldn't find it difficult - I actually couldn't do it," he laughs. "You'd have to tie my hand behind my back."

Nova Scotia finds McCann still painting for a living, as he was in the earlier plays, though he's now married to Didi Chance, a feted video artist much younger than him. Byrne, of course, is married to the actress Tilda Swinton, also his junior by some years. The action takes place in the far northeast of Scotland where, not co-incidentally, Byrne and Swinton live with their two children.

"The world that Phil inhabits, I suppose to a degree I have inhabited. The plays are looked upon as autobiographical because I only use myself and my experiences to make something that I then embellish and turn into something which is a fiction, a concoction with a narrative drive."

Since he started the Slab Boys cycle 30 years ago, Byrne has drawn many character and costume drawings for Phil, Spanky and the rest. The costume drawings are specifically for use in the theatrical productions, but the character drawings are something else. It's in them that Byrne gifts his cast of rogues, romantics and chancers their unique personalities and allows them to exist separately from the text. It's in them that he charts the progression from bequiffed and cocky teenagers to bohemian longhairs to where we find them today: grizzled, portly, a little careworn. Interestingly, Byrne talks about his desire some day to see the Slab Boys trilogy made into a digital animation, which would require 3D models to be made of his 2D creations, as if he yearns for Phil and Spanky to have even more life than they do on the page.

As flatulent slurping noises tells us we've reached the bottom of our drinks, I ask Byrne if he would consider a fifth instalment, perhaps with Phil and Spanky zimmering around the grounds of a landscaped retirement home.

"I've thought about it in a very careless and frivolous fashion," he says. "I might return to them in their 80s. I swore to myself that I wouldn't revisit them after Still Life, so who knows? Never say never. But I don't think I will." A minute later he seems to have changed his mind. "Possibly in the hereafter," he says. "Neither of them would use a zimmer, though. They'd do anything but."

To heaven for the Slab Boys, then, where they can be any age they want? Maybe, he says. Or maybe the other place. I don't know for certain, but I don't think he means Paisley.