Getting inside knowledge on Ordinary Decent Criminal
Mark Thomas and Ed Edwards on their new play
An ordinary decent criminal, explains Mark Thomas, is “someone who’s in for a crime, something they did. You’re not innocent, you’re not a political prisoner, you’re just run-of-the-mill trash”.
“It’s what the screws called non-IRA prisoners in Ireland,” chips in Ed Edwards.
“The political prisoners, even if they hadn’t done any actual crimes, were something else… terrorists.”
Ed spent a couple of years in jail in the early 1990s for drug offences. He was sentenced to three-and-a-half but was released early, he says, for good behaviour.
It wouldn’t be quite right to say he then became a writer. He already was a writer, or at least a published author, when he was locked up.
“I literally had a book published the day I was sentenced. I remember sitting in my ‘pad’ (cell) thinking it was s***, terrible. But at least it had been published so I could take it to ‘Education’ and say, ‘Look, I’ve written a book’.
“So they put me on a computer course and I wrote my second novel there.”
“Everyone used to call you Shakespeare, didn’t they?” says Mark.
“Yeah,” says Ed. “It was, ‘Hey, Shakespeare!’
“I calculated it cost 30 grand to put me in jail and I was already clean. I’d had treatment and was free from all drugs, even tobacco, and I worked out it was like a 30 grand writing grant.”
“A 30 grand writing grant with really s*** food,” laughs Mark.
“To be honest,” says Ed, “for the first two weeks I was thinking the food wasn’t too bad. By the third week you’re going, ‘Oh my god! Not this again.’”
Decent criminal he may have been. Just how ordinary is open to debate, as one who found prison conducive (food aside) to creative writing.
Since his time inside, Ed Edwards has written stage and radio plays and worked on TV shows including Brookside, The Bill and Holby City. He is currently ‘writer on attachment’ at the National Theatre.
And what hasn’t Mark Thomas done? He’s a comic, writer and theatre maker but that doesn’t tell half the story. Also proudly listed on his CV are his fearless activism, his work with refugees and his triumphs in court.
Listed with his Fringe First and Sony awards are a UN human rights award and a medal of honour from the Kurdish Congress.
The pair, who are chatting to me on screen, are coming our way in Ed’s new play, Ordinary Decent Criminal, with Mark as its charismatic protagonist, Frankie.
“I call myself an actor only with huge reticence,” says Mark modestly.
But he was also the sole performer in Ed’s award-winning second play, England & Son, which traced a connection between a juvenile offender and the crimes of our colonial past.
They were mutual fans before working together, Ed going to Mark’s gigs and Mark saying to his partner after seeing Ed’s first play, The Political History of Smack and Crack: “That’s the best (expletive deleted) thing I’ve seen in years.”
They first got together creatively, they say, when working at Live Theatre where Ordinary Decent Criminal is to be premiered on July 23.
Ed says he wrote it with Mark in mind and that it took him back to his time in prison.
“I think I’d sort of blocked it off. I’d never written about it and I do like to start, when I’m writing, with something real.
“Obviously it goes off at tangents but it’s based on my experiences and there are certain bits that are verbatim at the beginning.
“They tend to go on to become something else because I like to surprise myself. My theory is that if I can’t surprise myself with what I’m writing, I won’t be able to surprise the audience.
“So everything and everybody in the thing is based on real events but none of it’s real.”
In the play Frankie reflects on his time before, during and after imprisonment, including the notorious Strangeways riot of 1990 when inmates seized control of the Manchester prison and shouted their grievances from the roof.
This happened just before Ed was sent down but it impacted on his time inside, he says.
A public inquiry headed by Newcastle-born lawyer Lord Woolf (who doesn’t figure in the play) called prison conditions “intolerable” and recommended reforms resulting in what Ed calls “a temporary spike in a more liberal way of doing things”. Strangeways was rebuilt and renamed.
A political activist before going to prison, he believes all this was “absolutely 100%” down to the prisoners’ actions.
He remembers protesting outside Strangeways during the riot and seeing the governor climb on a wall in a bid to quell the crowd.
Of fictional Frankie, Mark says: “He’s my version of Ed, a character deeply committed politically who falls by the wayside and ends up enmeshed in a world of drugs.
“It’s about him rediscovering his political yearnings in jail. This bloke goes to jail a bad ’un – not terribly bad, but bad – and ends up being a good ’un.”
And although it’s set some 30 years ago, both men insist it’s pertinent to the criminal justice system today.
“It has resonance with what’s happening with Palestine Action and the fact protest is being criminalised,” says Mark.
“The idea that you can end up in jail for wearing a badge is (expletive deleted) nuts.”
Controversially, Palestine Action was proscribed by the Government this month under the Terrorism Act, making membership of or support for it illegal.
Ed’s play is produced by new writing theatre company Paines Plough, Live Theatre, Plymouth Theatre Royal and Ellie Keel Productions in association with Synergy Theatre Project.
Directed by Charlotte Bennett, of Paines Plough, it has been taking shape during rehearsal and a work-in-progress tour which concludes at Alnwick Playhouse on July 17 and then The Witham, Barnard Castle, on July 18.
“I always say I deliver a script which is 100% me and by the time the rehearsals arrive it’s 100% Mark,” says Ed, not complaining but appreciative.
Mark says he likes the spare, “active” nature of Ed’s writing. The passion and directness of Mark’s delivery is well known, having earned him plaudits and got him both in and out of hot water.
Ed recalls the guys he met in prison, including one who is still a good mate.
“There were loads of people who’d just needed some money, basically. One guy was trying to set up a recording studio and some mates were robbing security vans and saying, ‘We go out and get 10 grand every time’.
“He went out and, of course, got caught first time.”
In the play, we’re told, Frankie, sentenced for dealing drugs, finds none of his fellow convicts are what they seem.
“With his typewriter, his activist soul and his sore lack of a right hook,” the blurb goes, “he somehow finds his way into their troubled hearts, and they into his.
“In the most unexpected of places, he discovers that the revolution is not dead. It’s just sleeping.”
Catch Ordinary Decent Criminals (recommended for ages 16 plus) in Newcastle from July 23 to 26 before it’s off to Edinburgh and then on tour. There will be a free talk by Mark, Ed and Charlotte after the July 24 performance.
Tickets from Live Theatre online or call 0191 232 1232.