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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com Irvine Welsh Biography Given the level of his fame these days, it’s easy to forget that Irvine Welsh spent a long time in relative obscurity during the 1990s, and even after the critically acclaimed publication of Trainspotting, didn’t really arrive in the mainstream until the advent of the movie. Trainspotting (the book, the movie, the play) is one of the cultural landmarks of 90s Britain and continues to hold a strange fascination on successive generations of readers. Harry Gibson’s stage adaptation in particular has introduced theatre to a whole new audience who would otherwise never go to see a play. Welsh’s subsequent output has been interesting and uneven - as evinced by Gary Marshall’s scathing review of Filth, which gets plenty of hate mail from Welsh fanboys - and his transformation into a pillar of the UK’s literary establishment within the space of a decade is nothing short of bizarre. I set up IrvineWelsh.com as a link directory to Welsh related material on the Net, while Welsh’s own official site is at IrvineWelsh.net. Chris Mitchell � Articles BUY Irvine Welsh books online from and Expletives Repeated Interview with Harry Gibson by Chris Mitchell 539 You’ll Have Had Your Theatre Feature by Dr Willy Maley Queerspotting 541 Zoe Strachan’s feature on Irvine Welsh and Alan Warner Filth 545 Review by Gary Marshall 554 538 More Spike email RSS Facebook Twitter A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com Interview [published September 1997] Irvine Welsh / Harry Gibson: Expletives Repeated Harry Gibson’s stage adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting has taken the theatre world by storm. Chris Mitchell discusses censorship, sincerity and swearing with the director Trainspotting has been the cultural phenomenon of 1996. Irvine Welsh’s Edinburgh-based tale of drugs, dole and self-destruction has sold over 400,000 copies, the film has won critical acclaim across England, Europe and America, while the stage version has played to packed houses throughout the country. The stage versions of four of Welsh’s plays have subsequently been collected in the book 4Play. It’s arguable that the play has been the most extreme of Trainspotting’s three incarnations, its profanity and violence sending shockwaves through the theatre circuit. The Times reviewed Trainspotting’s debut last December under the headline “West End gets smack in the face”. This month the show steams into Brighton’s Gardner Arts Centre to conclude its seventh production within a year. The cast of four has gone through 23 different line-ups in that time, testament to the psychological toll of enacting Welsh’s narcotic nightmares. Trainspotting’s director Harry Gibson first started work on adapting the novel three years ago. Asked if Welsh had any direct input on the stage script, Gibson laughs, “Oh no, he thinks theatre is bourgeois shite. Which is, BUY Irvine Welsh books online from and of course, completely true. But now I’ve converted him and he thinks most theatre is bourgeois shite. The sign of a true genius and professional is that they let you get on with it without peering over your shoulder.” Gibson is already well familiar with the intricacies of censorship, thanks to the problems Trainspotting’s language has encountered: “BBC Radio asked me ages ago to do an adaptation of Trainspotting. Then they looked at it. When they realised that landing on ‘Planet Trainspotting’ means you can’t walk for two lines without bumping into a cunt, they bottled.” It’s precisely this sort of restriction that makes Gibson passionate about the stage: “Theatre is a far more explicit medium. I’d hesitantly say that gives it the edge over the film version of Trainspotting. But then, the film version was trying to do something completely different. It’s The Likely Lads on acid. It’s also a miracle of marketing. “But you don’t need that in the theatre because you know it’s bourgeois shite and no one’s going to come and see it unless you put on something really unusual. So you just concentrate on being as faithful to the origi- 539 More Spike email RSS Facebook Twitter A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
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