Ordinary Decent Criminal
at the North Wall Arts Centre
on Thursday, October 23 and Friday 24<\/p>\n
By Jon Lewis<\/p>\n
Brown Sugar with Porridge<\/p>\n
Ordinary Decent Criminal Pic: Pamela Raith Photography<\/p>\n
Frankie is a drug dealer and user of heroin. He\u2019s an affable south Londoner living in Manchester who has been caught and sentenced. Because Manchester\u2019s crumbling Strangeways was seriously damaged in the riots of 1990, Frankie is incarcerated \u2018somewhere between Manchester and Liverpool\u2019 where \u2018something\u2019s coming, you can feel it\u2019. Frankie\u2019s got the gift of the gab, and in a 70-minute solo show, Ordinary Decent Criminal, which won a Fringe First in Edinburgh this summer, Mark Thomas grippingly enacts his story.<\/p>\n
Written by Ed Edwards, whose previous, uncomfortable, post-imperial play with Mark Thomas, England & Son, also won a Fringe First, there\u2019s much more comedy and a lighter ambience to Ordinary Decent Criminal. Edwards focuses on Frankie\u2019s engagements in the jail with four key individuals, none of them really comic material on paper. There\u2019s the drug kingpin with the actorly nickname DeNiro, a white convert to Islam from Liverpool, who takes Frankie under his wing. DeNiro boasts of travelling the world, having property in Florida, a beautiful wife and kids in private school. He\u2019s treating his six years inside like a holiday having been defended in court by the barrister for the Krays.<\/p>\n
Ordinary Decent Criminal Pic: Pamela Raith Photography<\/p>\n
It is dangerous to be accused of being a nonce in prison, something affecting Kenny, who is a prisoner in a nearby cell. Kenny stabbed his mother\u2019s partner almost to death after he made advances on Kenny and now he\u2019s an unexploded bomb. The final two prisoners close to Frankie are polar opposites, and potential enemies: Belfast Tony, ex IRA, but confessing to another crime so he stays under the radar in this prison, and Bron, a former soldier, heavily tattooed, in for murder. Frankie is afraid of both men, their menace suggesting the comic threats found in many of Pinter\u2019s plays.<\/p>\n
On a set with metal crush barriers, some of which light up in different colours to suggest different locations in Frankie\u2019s back story (designer, Lydia Denno), director Charlotte Bennett ensures that Thomas\u2019 versatile delivery packs an emotional punch as well as delivers uncomfortable truths. I certainly didn\u2019t see the twist at the end coming. A terrific production.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ordinary Decent Criminal at the North Wall Arts Centreon Thursday, October 23 and Friday 24 By Jon Lewis…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":543737,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8816],"tags":[19639,748,29404,1102,4884,8728,712,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-543736","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-edinburgh","8":"tag-arts-and-entertainment","9":"tag-britain","10":"tag-divert-me","11":"tag-edinburgh","12":"tag-great-britain","13":"tag-newbury","14":"tag-scotland","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115479022421463916","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/543736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=543736"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/543736\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/543737"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=543736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=543736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=543736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}