Out of the Blue,
Edinburgh
Four stars
It's like stepping into
a time-warp even before the young and tellingly named In Your Face
Theatre company's revival of Harry Gibson's stage version of Irvine
Welsh's seminal debut novel properly begins. The early 1990s techno
that plays prior to the show in a venue dark and expansive enough to
fool the audience into thinking they've stumbled on some dilapidated
warehouse in the middle of nowhere has something to do with it. So
too do the studiedly observed re-creations of the poster images from
Danny Boyle's 1996 film version on the programme of Christopher Rybak
and Craig Boyle's promenade production, which arrives just a few
months shy of the play's twentieth anniversary.
There, however,
similarities end, as Rybak and Boyle's chorus of glow-stick wielding
hoodied-up grim reapers lead us through a ghost train vision of Mark
Renton and his assorted drug buddies in what is essentially a series
of cut-up routines taken off the page and injected with rude, noisy
life. As Renton, Begbie, Tommy and Sick Boy flit from cartoon wasters
to a more tragic downward spiral in an instant, there's a glorious
DIY roughness at play designed to mess up the senses.
Where two decades ago
the play was of the moment, it remains as urgent as ever despite
being a period piece. The female characters seem stronger, while it's
easier in hindsight to recognise how a generation thrown onto the
scrap-heap were just coming alive again, re-energised and politicised
by repetitive beats. Given the current climate, this is a vital
restaging that suggests that a brand new generation might just be en
route to finding their voice.
The Herald, December 20th 2013
ends
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