The Evil Doers (NHB Modern Plays)

By Chris Hannan

Tracky is a teenage heavy metal fan with life issues. Her mother's an alcoholic. Her father's a taxi driver with delusions of becoming a tour guide. Now they're being pursued by a loanshark. None of this is going to end well...
Chris Hannan's play The Evil Doers is a chaotic, violent, comic odyssey through the dismal streets of 1980s Glasgow.
'An alcoholic is not someone who drinks too much; an alcoholic is an emotional whirlwind, a destructive force which tears up everything in his or her path, and then passes, disappears, utterly unaware of the devastation caused. The Evil Doers is about the whirlwind and those in its path.' Chris Hannan
First produced at the Bush Theatre, London, in August 1990, The Evil Doers won a Time Out Award, a Plays and Players' Critics Award, and that year's Charrington London Fringe Award for Best Play.
'Uproariously funny... Hannan has a sharp eye for flaky characterisation and a wonderful ear for quirky vernacular dialogue, a sawn-off language of violent verbal collisions, like a pile-up on the motorway… We never quite stop laughing but it becomes increasingly painful to do so, and I suspect that no-one will be able to watch the bruising final scene without physically flinching.' Telegraph
'A gorgeously enjoyable play. As in the comedies of Ben Jonson and Middleton, the hunt for money gives the play its structure. Like Jonson and Middleton also, Hannan owns a penetrating eye for tricks of character and an equally sharp ear... A world of uncertain egos where the characters bounce off each other like bumper cars, powered by sources beyond their control.' The Times
'A vicious and idiosyncratic Glaswegian city comedy.' Observer
'The verve, the iconoclastic humour is tremendous, each character brilliantly personalised.' Herald
'Extraordinary free-ranging vitality.' 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

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Release date: Jun 8, 2017
• ISBN: 9781780018409

Chris Hannan

His plays include Elizabeth Gordon Quinn (Traverse 1985); The Evil Doers (Time Out Award 1990 and Charrington London Fringe Best New Play Award); Shining Souls which opened at the Traverse in 1996 and was revived by the Old Vic in 1997, winning a Scotland on Sunday Critics Award and a Lloyds Bank Playwright of the Year nomination. In 2006 Elizabeth Gordon Quinn was revived by the National Theatre of Scotland in its inaugural season. The God of Soho was staged by Shakespeare’s Globe (2011) and The Three Musketeers and the Princess of Spain (Traverse, English Touring Theatre, Coventry Belgrade) was nominated in the 2011 CATS (Critics’ Awards for Theatre in Scotland) in four categories, winning Best New Play and Best Ensemble. As well as original plays, Hannan has adapted Crime and Punishment (Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre/Liverpool Playhouse/Lyceum Edinburgh, 2013) and The Iliad (Lyceum Edinburgh, 2016); and also made new versions of Ibsen’s The Pretenders (RSC, 1991), Gogol’s Gamblers (Tricycle 1992), and Stars in the Morning Sky (Coventry Belgrade, 2012). His 2008 novel Missy was awarded the McKitterick Prize for a debut novel.

Book preview

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