If Trainspotting has ever stopped being in the news since Irvine Welsh's debut novel was first published in 1993, it's renewed profile is currently at a premium. This is largely to do with Danny Boyle's stylish film version of Welsh's tale of life and death among Edinburgh's junkie culture, which became a totem of 1990s pop culture, as its flashy mix of sex, drugs and rock and roll among the dole queue classes went stratospheric. Boyle's film receives a screening at next month's Edinburgh International Film Festival, just as its original cast have reconvened twenty years on to begin work on a sequel. While both Welsh's book and Boyle's film tapped into a zeitgeist that gave voice to a strata of society previously sidelined by the artistic mainstream unless it was American, it has been largely forgotten that Harry Gibson's stage adaptation did something similar between the two. Gibson's version was originally seen at the Citizens Theatre
An archive of arts writing by Neil Cooper. Effete No Obstacle.