Glasgow has long liked to see itself as city of hard men. They might be legitimately violent, such as the succession of world champion boxers; fictionally violent, as in lurid bestsellers such as No Mean City; or actually violent like Jimmy Boyle, the convicted murderer turned artist. The slew of plays, books and films about Boyle, some of them by him, betray a fascination as much for what he did before his rehabilitation in the notorious Special Unit in Glasgow’s Barlinnie prison (long since closed) as on his recovery.
Among the first of those, filmed but rarely seen on stage since its first appearance in 1977, was The Hard Man, on which he is credited as co-writer with the late Tom McGrath, and which is heavily based on his life before and in jail. One of the points the play makes, then as now, is that violence breeds violence. Boyle, or Byrne in the play, was undoubtedly a nasty piece of work but, at the time, nor were the Scottish prison and police services without their violent goons.
There are those who saw the depiction of Byrne’s refusal to bend the knee to the forces of law and order as a triumph of the human spirit. Others were repelled by his self-justifying perorations, delivered directly to the audience, about how, to the fag end of society in which he operated, he was the embodiment of the justice system, the banking system or the social services. All that was surely a slap in the face to those who faced similarly tough situations but chose not to go round sticking knives into people.
None of that has changed in Phillip Breen’s lively and intelligent production for the Scottish Theatres Consortium, which manages the never easy trick of upscaling what was originally a studio theatre piece into something that comfortably fills a main stage. The device of accompanying the action with a live percussionist is kept, while the vast tenement walls, set at right angles with gossiping women in the windows, concentrate the action centre stage.
The ambiguities remain, though Act II veers dangerously close to the fetishisation of violence that McGrath set out to question. Alex Ferns, shaven-headed and pugnacious, is gutsy as Byrne though for me he never entirely captures the latent menace I felt upon meeting the real Boyle. The play is not explicitly biographical which, with such explosive material, leaves one wondering whether this or that detail really happened.
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The supporting cast are strong while the play is as uncomfortable but thought-provoking as ever. Perhaps most sobering is that it does not feel at all out of date.
Box office: 0131-529 6000, to April 9, then touring Scotland until May 7