EdFringe Review: Ordinary Decent Criminal

In the aftermath of the infamous Strangeways Prison Riot, playwright Ed Edwards introduces us to Frankie, a small-time drug importer and recovering addict. He’s a lively, interesting chap, a man of words, and well aware of the contradiction he’s living. He idolises both his girlfiend and her kid, whilst managing her heroin supply in an attempt to save her.

The long arm of the law finds him soon enough.

Far from a hardened criminal, he’s ill-prepared for a prison sentence, though ‘lucky’ enough to enter the more liberal successor to the riot-blighted Strangeways. Inside, he finds a world of convicts, none of whom are precisely what they seem. It’s an odd place to rediscover the revolutionary spirit lost when the USSR fell, but as he discovers, ‘…it turns out that the only people prepared to fight are the ones who have nothing left to lose.’

Mark Thomas’s handling of this dramatic monologue is just superb, bringing Frankie and a compact cast of characters to life through masterful shifts in both accent and physicality. His comic timing and delivery are no surprise, but his feel for both pathos and bathos are equally impressive.

Director Charlotte Bennett sets a propulsive pace, whilst making impressive use of Lydia Denno’s modest but monumental set, woven from metal safety barriers. The red flag left to sprawl across the backdrop evokes shades of imperial Rome and a collapsed Communist dream. Does it represent a tyrannical prison empire to be overthrown, or a totem of hope in need of rising? Perhaps both.

“Mark Thomas’s handling of this dramatic monologue is just superb, bringing Frankie and a compact cast of characters to life through masterful shifts in both accent and physicality.“

Yet, this is no trite hero’s journey through adversity to triumph, drawing as it does on Edwards’ lived experience as a convict with a love of the written word. This isn’t Porridge or Prisoner Cell Block H, but a brick-and-mortar cage for all manner of everyday humanity, some dangerous, some damaged, some both.

Edwards and Thomas introduce us to a selection from PTSD-afflicted former para Bron, definitely-not-member-of-the-IRA, Belfast Tony, and would-be murderer of his mum’s paedophile boyfriend, Kenny.

Frankie has reason to fear all three, and plenty to learn from each. He also has ample time to consider his life, and the sequence of joys and disasters that substituted the love of narcotics for youthful, revolutionary fervour.

Thanks to sparing, but almost poetic text, and Elena Peña’s immersive soundtrack, augmented by a little lighting wizardry by Drumond Orr, we join Frankie in the place and times which made him, from brutal encounters with protest-smashing police, to the drug-fuelled raves which offered love when all else failed. Back in his present, the prison is drawn in more mundane shades, the colour coming from its population.

The countdown to Frankie’s next crisis begins when he begins to care for some of them. Will the red flag fly again? Or will the death of his existing dreams bury him before he finds something old to believe in again?

It’s a story that grips you from first to last, offering characters to care for and a life story shaded with hair-raising drama, comedy shaded from grey to gallows, and underpinned by a fundamental belief in the power of rebellion.