Review: Fantastic Acting Saved Trainspotting
WHEN Irvine Welsh’s Edinburgh-set novel, Trainspotting was published in 1993, it shocked the literary world, writes Emma Durdle.
His blunt warts-and-all tale about a group of young people whose lives were dominated by their addiction to heroin was a gritty subject presented with wry humour which became an unlikely bestseller.
The film adaptation came in 1996 and was equally as shocking, or arguably more so, because the images were there on our screen in full colour (anyone one who has seen the scene where Renton fishes out opium suppositories from a filthy toilet bowl will know what I mean).
But having seen the stage adaptation now nearly 10 years after first watching the film, I found it difficult to be shocked.
Not difficult because smack addiction is something we take lightly today, or because the play is any less graphic, but because the story itself tells us nothing new. Harry Gibson’s adaptation, now showing at the Broadway Theatre, Catford, under the direction of Cameron Jack is kept close to the original tale, but it offers us nothing more than what we know already.