Showing @ King’s Theatre, Edinburgh until Sat 9 Apr

“If it takes a lifetime to kill a man with his debts, it doesn’t make it any less of a murder”. Tom McGrath’s 1977 text The Hard Man, which he wrote in collaboration with Scottish hard man Jimmy Boyle, couldn’t have foreseen how relevant that line would appear over 30 years later. Director Phillip Breen presents a fierce, stylised account of gang culture in Glasgow, mirroring the brutality, violence and sadism McGrath set to map out.

Fictionalising the life of Jimmy Boyle, the play sees petty thief and criminal Johnny Byrne (Alex Ferns) fall in with gangsters and mob bosses. Together with his sidekicks (Nicky Elliot and Iain Robertson), they take what they want, do what they want, and give a Glesgae smile to anyone who says otherwise. After Byrne is convicted of murder however, his animalism and lust for violence are the only things which keep him alive.

“Violence is an art form”. Addressing the audience, Byrne seems to sum up this production quite well. From the stylised slow-motion fighting sequences overlaid with Nat King Cole songs, to the punchy and fluid scene changes motored by a constant percussive soundtrack, the glamorisation of Byrne’s hunger for violence enthralls and unsettles. Yet for all his asides and attacks on the middle-classes, Byrne’s sophistication is borne out of the occasional reference to the superego or Oedipus, reflecting not only a depth to his belligerency, but an awareness of his ability to confront social class structures. While the play is, at times, let down by a certain level of predictability, it’s made up for in Ferns’ hypnotising performance as a man constructed out of an inherently flawed social system. And while he maims and punishes the debtors who come to him a month late, he himself is a man left short: by the lack of social values and moral structures which have conned him out of anything other than a reckless and self-destructive existence.