“I want the audience to feel like they haven’t been to the theatre but have been through an experience, like they’d been beaten up by it!” says Mark Thomas of Ordinary Decent Criminal. Picture: Pamela Raith Photography
POLITICAL comedian, activist and actor Mark Thomas reunites with playwright and ex-offender Ed Edwards to perform Ordinary Decent Criminal at York Theatre Royal Studio on December 2 and 3.
Directed by Paines Plough joint artistic director Charlotte Bennett, who cut her theatrical teeth at the Theatre Royal’s TakeOver festival, Edwards’s tale of freedom, revolution and messy love tells the story of Frankie, a recovering addict sentenced to three and a half years in prison for dealing drugs in the 1990s after the Strangeways Prison Riot. All done and dusted in 70 intense minutes without an interval.
On arrival, Frankie finds that none of his fellow convicts are what they seem, but with his typewriter, his activist soul and his sore lack of a right hook, he somehow burrows his way into their troubled hearts, and they into his. In the most unexpected of places, he discovers that the revolution is not dead, only sleeping.
“It’s a play about a political reawakening,” says Edwards, who also wrote the Edinburgh Fringe First-winning A Political History Of Smack And Crack and England & Son. “It’s about a character who swallowed their political commitment after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, where it seems to him that all hope of political progress in the world has died. It’s also about seeing that the fight has to go on, with or without hope.”
Edwards served three and a half years in jail himself many moons ago. “A play has to have some sort of spark, so the spark for this was writing about those experiences and trying to make some sense out of them, which I hadn’t done for 30 years.”
How did Edwards come to collaborate with Thomas? “Mark saw my play The Political History Of Smack And Crack and really enjoyed it,” he says. “We met a couple of times after that and got on really well. Eventually, I wrote to him and asked if I could write something for him.
Ordinary Decent Criminal playwright Ed Edwards and comedian-actor Mark Thomas
“He said ‘yes’, and then we didn’t do that idea. We did something else – England & Son – that emerged from our conversations. Ordinary Decent Criminal is the follow-up to that.
“When you’re writing a play for Mark Thomas, you’re looking for the laughs, and Mark will always make them work.”
Thomas, whose tour of Ordinary Decent Criminal has brought him to the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, Selby Town Hall and Leeds Playhouse already, now returns to York Theatre Royal Studio, where he performed England & Son in September 2023.
“I love Ed, I properly love him. He is my brother and my comrade,” he says of Edwards. “He’s a brilliant man, a really lovely bloke, and we communicate in a really meaningful way as colleagues. He’s so funny. He comes up with gags all the times.
“Like when I was about to go on stage at Paines Plough in England & Son, he suddenly appeared next to me to say he had this idea to change a line, when I was waiting for the lighting cue to start.”
Thomas recalls telling Edwards to “go away in brusque monosyllabic language”. “I walked on stage, I did do the new line, and afterwards he came up and said ‘I shouldn’t have done that to you’, but the line worked, and the way we work is not as structured as others might work in the theatre,” he says.
“We have a good argument, but good ones about art and ideas and ideology,” says Mark Thomas of his working relationship with Ed Edwards. Picture: Tony Pletts
“Ed has said that when I do stand-up he liked how I do impersonations that become characters very quickly, so he has written the scripts with Mark Thomas in mind. I love how he doesn’t waste time [in his writing]; he just gets on with it, so it feels like we can snap in and out of things.”
Thomas has found that he improvises less in theatre, where he is drawn to its emotional depth and power, allied to the fast pace and economy of his stand-up. “I’m 62, I’m officially five years from retirement, and on November 19 I celebrated my 40th anniversary as a professional performer, and what I love is that I’m still learning stuff; still finding new ways of doing things,” he says.
“I’m working with people who are teaching me new things, and for me, that’s wonderful because what’s the point if you get to the point where you say, ‘No, I’ll just do the same old stuff’. All of this is a delight to me, and Ed is such a unique voice as there’s no-one else that has his insightful passion.
“We have a good argument, but good ones about art and ideas and ideology, and I love that when Ed and I started working on England & Son, we worked with prisons on addiction recovery – and that work continues, taking shows into prisons.”
Thomas continues: “The prisoners will give you a little push, asking ‘have you been inside?’. ‘No, but the writer has’. ‘Have you ever had an addiction?’. ‘Yeah, but not now’ [Thomas has talked of having past issues with alcohol addiction, but is sober now, while Edwards is a recovering drug addict].
“They’re looking for bull****, so you do the show, and what’s fascinating is that the reaction is immediate. It just pours out of them, and a number of them have been inspired to write their own stories, so you feel you’ve won.
“Theatre opened up a world that I didn’t think was available to me,” says Mark Thomas. Picture: Pamela Raith Photography
“We’ve worked with the Synergy Theatre Project too, who work with prisoners, workshopping and doing performances of shows about prison life.”
Thomas has enjoyed working with director Charlotte Bennett. “She’s magnificent,” he says. “What she’s great at, she’s absolutely brilliant at, is making you look at things anew, and you think, ‘oh, I’ve just been skipping over this’!
“It’s all about the work, and she’ll ask you things where you’ll say ‘I hadn’t thought of that’. What she’s good at too is pace, how it works, how it needs to shift, where you’ll investigate the overall shape of the show.
“Creating roles, how each character moves, she’ll look at the musicality of each character, which is fascinating, so it’s all been really refreshing, thinking ‘Ok, we can do it this way’.”
Thomas has drawn theatregoers, comedy fans and newcomers alike to the show. “What’s exciting is like when we were in Plymouth, a bloke said he was working on a construction site and was supposed to be going home but would now be there till Wednesday and didn’t know what to do in the evening, but he’d seen me do stand-up though he he’d never been to a theatre show…and he came!” he says.
“It’s that thing of ‘Don’t tell them it’s theatre’, and when I talked with Ed about the show, I said, I want them to feel like they haven’t been to the theatre but have been through an experience, like they’d been beaten up by it!”
Theatre and performance changed Mark Thomas’s life. “It opened up a world that I didn’t think was available to me, and that’s how I’ve always been, how I’ve always appreciated it since then,” says this son of a self-employed London builder.
“The first theatre performance I remember seeing was Spike Milligan playing Ben Gunn in Treasure Island, running around chucking cheese at a mermaid! I want people to come to this show [Ordinary Decent Criminal] and say it’s like nothing they’ve seen before.
“Theatre has this amazing way of making you feel and think something that you didn’t know or feel before; it gives you the chance to experience something that connects you with other people.”
Thomas suggests Ordinary Decent Criminal is more hopeful than England & Son. “It’s hopeful, and what this one does is show someone charting a course through obstacles in a way that England & Son didn’t,” he says.
“You see Frankie trying to find a way through all the dilemmas while keeping something of himself. There are lots more characters in this one too, and what’s great is that no-one is totally bad, whereas in England & Son, the dad was a dark, dark force. No-one is all bad, though every one of them is flawed.
“I love how the characters don’t punch down. It’s just as physical as England & Son, but Charlotte has brought environments to the set. I joke that it’s my IKEA Barbara Hepworth!”
Settled into the tour’s flow, Thomas concludes: “I actually think it’s a better show than England & Son. We’ve taken a step forward, and I think Ed would agree with that.”
Paines Plough, Live Theatre, Theatre Royal Plymouth and Ellie Keel Productions, in association with Synergy Theatre Project, present Ordinary Decent Criminal, York Theatre Royal Studio, December 2 and 3, 7.30pm. Age recommendation: 16 plus. Tickets update: sold out; for returns only, ring 01904 623568 or visit yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.
