Ordinary decent criminal
North Wall Arts Centre 
⭑⭑⭑⭑⭑

MARK THOMAS may well be the hardest working stand-up comedian in the country. He has been performing hundreds of gigs per year for decades, a great many of them benefit gigs for striking workers and resistant peoples the world over.

Thomas has a long history of activism, and was a familiar face on ’90s TV, when shows like his Comedy Product combined impassioned mockery of ruling-class misdemeanours with direct action against the perpetrators. He has subsequently written and performed several searing shows on themes such as Spycops, Israeli apartheid, and Wakefield’s Labour Club, the Red Shed.

But his venture into “traditional theatre” (if you can call it that!) is relatively new. Thomas has been an admirer of the work of playwright Ed Edwards ever since he saw his History of Crack and Smack, a love story between two addicts at the mercy of the geopolitical machinations of global counter-revolution. This is their second collaboration; the first, 2023’s England and Son, was a tour de force following the son of a brutal veteran of Britain’s “secret wars,” unable to shake the violent habits he’d picked up in Malaya and Aden. And like that earlier work, Ordinary Decent Criminal provides a vehicle for Thomas to inhabit a variety of weird and wonderful characters, showcasing the best and worst in human nature.

The setting this time is HMP Manchester, some time after it was rebuilt having been burnt to the ground in the Strangeways riots, making it “more New Labour than Maggie Thatcher. Sink. Proper toilet… but it doesn’t mean I’m not still fucking terrified!”

Our protagonist, Frankie — a one-time political activist whose life took a nose-dive when he discovered heroin around the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union — was not really built for prison (“let’s just say I lack a right hook”). But then, who is?

Once there, he encounters people like Kenny, in prison for stabbing his abusive stepfather; Robert (aka De Niro), the wing’s bullying racketeer; Miss Rosen, the Irish screw and Bron, her enforcer; and Belfast Tony, who is impressed that an “English dilettante” like Frankie knows so much about the Irish War. Frankie must summon up every fibre of skill, instinct and courage to navigate his way through the mutually contradictory demands each of them make of him, with those lacking coercive pressure more than making up for it with emotional blackmail.

The politics of the era form the inescapable backdrop to the events, brutally shaping the problems the characters face and the responses available to them — from the poll tax riots, to Ireland, to the miners’ strike.

Ed Edwards’s special talent is to examine some of the most important and disturbing themes in the national and global body politic — the relationship between imperialism and social malaise, corruption and anti-communism, militarism and child abuse — but always and only through the most compelling rendering of (extra)ordinary people’s lives and their understanding of them.

And Mark Thomas brings it all to life in the most engaging and captivating way. This is entertainment at its intense and thought-provoking best.

On tour until December 3. For venues and tickets see: painesplough.com