Showing @ Le Monde Upstairs, Edinburgh until Thu 21 Aug (not 8, 15, 16) @ 17:00
Billy Hayes’s life was captured in Alan Parker’s highly fictionalised movie Midnight Express, the story of a 23-year-old American “innocent abroad” who gets banged up in a Turkish jail for dope smuggling, depicting the cruelty and deprivation he received there and his astonishing escape. This is the engaging Hayes’ own vivid and emotional account overdosed with adjectives. He is now a wiry 67-year-old (but could pass for 20 years younger).
The first half of the well-rehearsed story is of his arrest and imprisonment and comes over at times a tad reheated, but the tale of his amazing escape is far more thrilling and his performance comes alive in the second half. His five-year incarceration has clearly left its mark. He admits he can no longer go to zoos: the animals pacing back and forth freak him out. He tells of how his experiences tested his weaknesses and revealed his strengths and how yoga saved sanity; he’d make a wonderful life coach. But it’s during the Q&A that the something missing from the show is revealed. When someone asks if his mother visited him in jail he becomes noticeably upset. ‘No, I couldn’t let her see me like that.’