Ordinary Decent Criminal at Summerhall and on tour – Edinburgh Fringe review

Playwright Ed Edwards and comedian, activist and actor Mark Thomas have become a regular double act. Following on from their success in the award-winning England & Son, about the toxic culture that breeds racism and hatred, they have reunited for Ordinary Decent Criminal, a monologue from inside a Manchester prison that is “more New Labour than Maggie Thatcher” but still has its share of violent challenges.

Where their previous collaboration felt contemporary, a commentary on today’s world, this is very specifically set in the early 1990s, where Frankie Donnelly, a genial drug dealer (“nothing hardcore, only weed”), is sentenced to three and a half years for importing cannabis disguised as chocolate.

Frankie’s background is only sketched. We learn, at various moments in Thomas’s quick-fire patter that he is university educated, a campaigner for the miners and against the Poll Tax, who turned to drugs in his youth and, even when he got clean, continued to trade. He’s also had a novel published, and in prison, his typewriter and his writing skills give him a degree of protection from, and access to, the people who surround him.

There’s vulnerable Kenny, a young lad who has stabbed his stepfather 27 times after years of abuse, a “white Muslim” drug lord named Robert, and the mysterious Belfast Tony, who may or may not be an IRA gunman. Their story unfolds with gripping clarity as these men emerge and interact with Frankie and one another in not always expected ways.

The production, on a stage of piled-up metal barricades and fairy lights, briskly directed by Charlotte Bennett, relies heavily on Thomas’s powerhouse performance. After years as a stand-up, he is revelatory as an actor, retaining an ability to hold an audience rapt, but jumping nimbly from character to character, voice to voice.

He allows emotion to show when he is describing Frankie’s own love life with a heroin addict and her young son, for whom he lovingly prepares pasta and pesto. He’s always compassionate when evoking the life around him, which, even amidst a relatively enlightened regime, leaves troubled men alone and troubled.

Edwards, who has himself spent time in prison, conveys the world with considerable subtlety and shade. He is also making a broad political point that “people only fight when they’ve got nothing to lose”, and advocates activism on their behalf. But his argument gets both blunter and less nuanced as it progresses, and its concluding summary of Donnelly’s life after release is ridiculously rapid, the ending abrupt.

Nevertheless, the show’s message about the need to protest and to act on behalf of those who cannot always act for themselves is essentially a pertinent one at a time when the right to protest and the use of the word terrorism are both under scrutiny. It offers food for thought, while Thomas’s charism and command make it hard to turn away.