The Bush Theatre, London (1990)
Chris Hannan's The Evil Doers makes you feel rather glad you don't belong to Glasgow, dear old Glasgow town. Set in the 1990s City of Culture, it's an attractively jagged urban comedy which aims to expose the unbrochurised truth concealed by all the upbeat PR. At its centre is Sammy Doak (Tom Mannion), who has tried to capitalize on the city's current high profile by turning himself into 'Danny Glasgow', a cabbie-cum-tour-guide. Though it pays a visit to the Burrell Collection, the play quickly veers off the official tourist-track as Sammy, with a Sassenach female journalist in tow, is pursued by a thuggish young loan-shark (Douglas Henshall), his alcoholic wife (Alison Peebles), their tortured, heavy-metal-loving daughter Tracky (Sharon Muircroft), and her best friend Susan (Katy Murphy), a rhapsodising crazyhair who carries a torch for the loan-shark. Most tours do not, I suspect, make such a central feature of the Royal Bank of Scotland cash dispenser.
Reminiscent at times of Bill Forsyth, and at others of Ian Heggie, the mood of the piece is engagingly off-beat throughout and manages to buoy up with a kind of hopefulness events and subject matter which would otherwise be depressingly bleak. Even the 21-year-old loan-shark tries to be both creepy and oddly sympathetic. Regarding his debt-collecting role as 'something like St Vincent de Paul. I visit the poor and try and remain anonymous', he clearly needs no further training in leering callousness. But the dance he is led by the Doaks, who fail to respond as normal people do to violent threats, helps you to see him in a more benign, comic light, as an ambitious new boy, driven to bug- eyed distraction by his first really stiff professional test.
If the Doaks put a strain on the loan-shark's nerves, they also send one another spare. 'The only thing that will save this family,' declares Sammy with some justice, 'is a fatal car crash'. The root of the problem, according to the daughter, is her father's refusal to face facts. He's so happy, she could cry. This optimistic obliviousness makes him collude in rather than attempt to arrest his wife's alcoholic collapse. It also, Hannan implies , accounts for his cheery, uncritical enthusiasm about the way the City of Culture is now being sold. To what extent this family and its turmoils are supposed to symbolise the place and its politics is never very clear, though, not even when the wife, bloodied from a mugging and in a whisky-stupor, passes out shortly after declaring that 'I'm Glasgow'.
Simon Usher's splendidly acted production has just the right degree of disciplined zaniness, and it is no criticism of it or the play as it now stands, to suggest that the material, suitably opened up, might work even better as a film for television. The one glaring fault is the English journalist, an embarrassing cipher whose presence in the play could only gratify someone writing a thesis on the role of the mobile-phone in contemporary drama. By way of compensation, Katy Murphy is a total delight as the spacey, fifteen-year-old Susan, a diminutive, bright-eyed enthusiast in leather, who regrets her own mother's boringness, compared to Mrs Doak: 'if she were a paranoid schizophrenic she could be someone . . . '.
By the end, Sammy has been brutally beaten up by the loan-shark and his wife is lying in characteristic pose, insensible amidst her spilled-out shopping. As an image of Glasgow, this will probably not do much for the city's tourist industry, but the play in which it is contained is a lively tribute to its culture.
Paul Taylor
"Very Mean City" from The Independent 3 September 1990, Arts p.11
Pachyderm polemics against the herd
A late note on Chris Hannan's The Evil Doers, which projects a memorable view of Europe's cultural capital. Sammy (Tom Mannion) has given up a factory job to squire tourists round the wonders of Clydeside; but his only reliable client is a loan-shark who tracks him through the play and finally beats him to a pulp. The pursuit also involves Sammy's nightmare wife, his bitterly aggrieved daughter and her spaced- out girlfriend. Strapped into a rigid pattern of events, these characters have extraordinary free-ranging vitality. In the performances of Alison Peebles and Douglas Henshall you can see what these people were before the city made them as they are; while it is hard to believe that the torrent of Glaswegian street poetry poured out by Katy Murphy can ever have been memorised from a text. Simon Usher directs a magnificent company.
Irving Wardle
Extract) from The Independent on Sunday 16 September 1990, Arts p.22