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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
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