The Evil Doers - Author Comment

There seems to be a prejudice against re-writing. As if you should leave the work of the Muse alone and not tinker with it. That's not how I feel. Laurel & Hardy used to watch their films in the cinema with an audience, then go back and re-edit them; the Marx Brothers would go to a theater in San Francisco and try out their material in front of an audience, then revise it before they shot their films. Are comedians the only ones who take their work seriously?

Evil Doers Poster ::

When I write something that catches the interest and imagination of an audience my instinct is the same as a stand-up comic's - I want to work it.  Polish it.

In the case of The Evil Doers I would revise the first half. The strength and pace of Simon Usher's direction hurried the show over certain bumpy parts in the script; and I felt the comedy didn't begin to take a hold of the audience until they met the alcoholic Agnes Doak and began to see the terror that was behind the comic chaos of her husband's mind.  I'd like to bring her onstage a little sooner, I think.

I'd also comprehensively rewrite the English journalist character, and lift the play out of the topical context (Glasgow's year of being European City of Culture) which gave it a journalistic immediacy.

Alison Peebles as the alcoholic mother :: photo copywright Fatimah Nandar

Best moment in the Bush show? Dougie Henshall and Katy Murphy stole the reviews with seductively funny performances; and I don't think I've seen the MIND of an alcoholic better played than it was by Alison Peebles.

But watching big Tom Mannion in the last scene, all bloodied after being beaten up by the loanshark, and full of dignity and acceptance as he explains to his daughter the uselessness of loving her alcoholic mother, was one of those times when you are not watching theatre but a quietly momentous event in someone's life.

Quotes

"The verve, the iconoclastic humour is tremendous, each character brilliantly personalised." 
The Herald
“Extraordinary free-ranging vitality.” 
The Independent on Sunday
“No plot description can explain the beauty, warmth and poetic energy of Chris Hannan's The Evil Doers. In its generosity of attention, its expansiveness and richness, in the scale of its emotional intensities, it is as broad as a city itself. It is a modern masterpiece.” 
Encore Theatre Magazine