The Slab Boys are back: John Byrne and David Hayman mix some fresh mayhem

It is 1977 and an aspiring playwright called John Byrne has decided he needs an agent. He rings up Peggy Ramsay, whose name he has found at the front of a script, and tells her about Writer’s Cramp, his anarchic first play, which is being staged on the Edinburgh fringe. She asks to see a copy, tells him she is going on holiday for a fortnight and says she expects to have received a second play from him on her return.

Two weeks later, Byrne calls her back. “Hello, Miss Ramsay, I have another play, quite different from Writer’s Cramp. It’s got a beginning, a middle and an end.”

Ramsay snaps back: “How fucking bourgeois, darling.”

That was the first and last time anyone used the word “bourgeois” to describe The Slab Boys. Set in the paint-mixing room of a Paisley carpet factory in the winter of 1957, Byrne’s semi-autobiographical comedy hit the stage with an energy that was ferocious, brutal, breathtakingly funny – and anything but polite.

It was written in a playful, abrasive, working-class Scots that seemed almost without precedent. “I’d never seen myself on stage – or anyone like me,” says Byrne. “I never saw anything about my culture.”

At the time, Byrne was a full-time painter with no credentials as a playwright, just a love of theatre, a subscription to Plays and Players and a couple of jobs as a designer. He’d created Billy Connolly’s famous banana boots for The Great Northern Welly Boot Show and built the set for 7:84’s The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil. As a result, he wasn’t certain what to do with The Slab Boys until his then wife, Alice Simpson, prompted him to pass a copy to the actor David Hayman, who was starting to branch out as a director.

Applying the kind of self-criticism he used as a painter, Byrne had already put the play through 18 drafts, each painstakingly written on a manual typewriter. Hayman didn’t have to change a word. Right away, he knew he’d been given something special. “The tears were running down my face,” says the former steel-yard apprentice. “I’d never read a funnier, more profound expression of working-class, west-of-Scotland life.”

In 1978, Hayman directed the first production, a runaway hit for Edinburgh’s Traverse, with a cast including a young Robbie Coltrane. “We laughed our way through three weeks of rehearsals,” says Hayman. “The first night was riotous. We probably put half an hour on to the running time to allow the audience to get the laughter out of their system.”

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It subsequently played at London’s Royal Court, bringing Byrne a London Evening Standard award for most promising playwright. “I came out convinced this playwright had wider horizons than any other young playwright alive,” said the critic Bernard Levin.

All these years later – and with a 12-year run in Trial and Retribution behind him – Hayman is staging The Slab Boys again, this time at Glasgow’s Citizens. “I’ve seen productions over the 30-odd years since we did the original and, with the greatest respect, they’ve been pastiches,” he says. “They’ve done John a disservice. I wanted to introduce a new generation to the richness of John’s work.”

At the heart of the play are Phil McCann, Spanky Farrell and Hector McKenzie, three 19-year-olds in a dead-end job grinding powder for paint slabs, while dreaming about Elvis, America and art school. The fast-paced repartee of Phil and Spanky, much like their merciless bullying of the hapless Hector, is a brash cover for their sense of desperation.

Is it true to say that Byrne is Phil McCann? “True-ish,” says the playwright through his silvery beard. “Inasmuch as I worked in the slab room and I wanted to be an artist.”

Also, inasmuch as he grew up with a mother who had mental health problems. “My mother was ill from when I was four until she died in 1980,” says Byrne. “It was a regular occurrence right through my mother’s life. It had a profound effect on me.”

So when McCann worries that mental illness could be catching, was that a thought that went through Byrne’s head? “Yes, constantly. If you’re that close to somebody who’s had manic spells, running out into the street in their nightclothes, going up to a woman’s house and punching her face through a window, with glass smashing all over their arm…” he breaks off as if he’s still picking out the shards in his mind.

“Those incidents in John’s life bring the profundity into the play,” says Hayman. “There’s revenge in there, there’s victimisation, there’s abuse. There are elements of savagery in Phil and Spanky and it’s so important for that to come out.”

Byrne chuckles at the memory of the first time round. “I heard many of the audience say they shouldn’t be laughing at all because it was so black.” But laugh they did.