Desperado Corner

Desperado Corner is a play written for the stage by English playwright Shaun Lawton. It started out as a collection of performance poems and monologues written and performed by Lawton in London between 1973 and 1976. It is set in the seaside town of Redcar in the north east of England in 1959.

The play was turned down by a number of theatres in London and it was not until 1981, due to the efforts of Riverside Studios Dramaturg Paul Kember that it finally premiered at the Citizens Theatre, in Glasgow, on 16 January of that year, with Di Trevis directing the following cast:

• Bob: Jim Cartwright
• Big Larry: Andrew Wilde
• Mattie: Gary Oldman
• Bazza: Mark Rylance
• Lily: Katherine Kitowitz
• Val: Johanna Kirby
• Frank: Ciarán Hinds
• Alderman: Patrick Hannaway
• Builder: Gordon Hammersley
• Policeman: Roger McKern
• Geordie: Shaun Lawton

Due to its success, a further production was staged that same year at the Citizens, this time directed by Robert David MacDonald. Frances Barber took over the role of Val while Jill Spurrier took over the role of Lily. Because of its unrestrained street language the play was considered controversial by some, yet it was hugely popular with a predominantly (and formerly) working-class audience in Glasgow, and received positive reviews, notably in The Times, The Guardian and The Scotsman.

On Jan 19th. 1981 Cordelia Oliver wrote in The Guardian: "

...those passages which are genuinely moving are those in which Lawton has found expression for the bitterness, the anger or the bewilderment which together drive the play along."

Ned Chaillet wrote in The Times on 17th Jan 1981:

"...Mr. Lawton's special achievement is to signal the deeper feelings through the obscenity and the joking."

And Trevor Griffiths writing in The Scotsman on 19th Jan 1981 said:

"I could simply lift the repellent aspects of Shaun Lawton's Desperado Corner at the Glasgow Citizens' Theatre and you would probably think it was a grim and depressing evening of social realism. Yet, despite the sordid catalogue of brutal events portrayed in graphic detail, ranging from the anal impaling of a canary via the killing of a baby and occasional razor slashings to vomitting into roadworks and onto workmen, the production achieved a kind of manic lyricism amid several moments of high comedy." He added: "Savagely funny, but not for the squeamish"

How It Was

For many of the actors it was a stepping-stone in their careers. Mark Rylance and Gary Oldman were immediately snapped up by agents, while Gary Oldman went on to act in Robert David MacDonald's Summit Conference, appeared in Mike Leigh's Mean Time, turned in a finely tuned Sid Viscious in Alex Cox's Sid & Nancy and picked up a BAFTA for Best Screenplay on Nil by Mouth. Mark Rylance went on to run the Globe Theatre in London for 10 years and has since picked up an Oscar, three Tony's and a couple of BAFTAs. Strongly influenced by Desperado Corner, Jim Cartwright wrote his own first play, Road (1986) which also enjoyed considerable success. Rylance, a 1980 RADA graduate, had been so enamored by Desperado Corner he took it back to his former school who's Principal, Hugh Cruttwell, then asked Lawton's permission for the 1981 Final Year students to stage it at their own theatre. The play turned out to be an actors perfect showpiece for playing to the RSC, the Bush and the Royal Court - theatres that had rejected Desperado Corner outright between 1976 - 1980. When they read it they didn't get it but when they saw it they adored it! Of the 1981 final year students at RADA who staged Desperado Corner, it was said Branagh was part of the 'new wave’ of actors to emerge from the Academy. Kenneth Branagh and John Sessions, like Mark Rylance, Gary Oldman, Frances Barber and Ciarán Hinds before them, went on to become high profile stage and screen actors - by all accounts charged up by the dialogue and energy of their Redcar experience!

Biblical Quotes

In the printed copy, on the page preceding the play proper, there are two quotes from the Bible. They are clues to the names of the two women's roles in the play – and both are brides. The second quote is straight forward but the clue in the first quote is more hidden in the wording itself – which in this form is not to be found in either the King James, or in the New English Bible – but in a different literary source:

″For our contention is not with the blood and the flesh, but with dominion, with authority, with the blind world-rulers of this life, with the spirit of evil in things heavenly.″

2nd Quote:

Bride ″I am an asphodel in Sharon, a lily growing in the valley.″

Bridegroom: ″No, a lily among thorns is my dearest among girls.″

Quotes

Kevin Coyne (Poet and singer/songwriter1976), “If you write like that, you are going to have problems!”

Robert Walker (Director, Half Moon Theatre, Stratford East, on the 1st Draft 1976) "I think the the play as a whole needs reworking but we'd love to do the school scenes and we have the actors from our workshop ready to do it!"

Malcolm McKay (Playwright and Director, on the 2nd Draft 1977) “It feels like it still needs some organising, but if you get it right you will be breaking new ground!

In a conversation in 2009 with the London agent of Ciarán Hinds, Lawton was told that "the stories of Desperado Corner at the Glasgow Citizens' are legion in the world of British theatre!"

American film-maker and Oscar winner Terrence Malick told Lawton that he had stood the theatre world on its head! - presumably words uttered by his partner in production, Gary Oldman.

Robert David MacDonald (Resident director at the Citizens & former student of Erwin Piscator in West Berlin) 1981: "Desperado Corner is possibly one of the five or six most important plays written in the last forty years!

At the last rehearsal at the Glasgow Citizens' the complete cast led by Andy Wilde as Big Larry, in and out of character, told Lawton that they wanted to thank him - 'for giving them something they could finally get their teeth into!'