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Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh acted as a shaping force
in promoting new writing and showcasing innovative
productions.
Suburban sermons yielded to urban hymns, as mainstream
political themes gave way to a slipstream of
more subtle and nuanced engagements with politics and
culture. Where John McGrath used folk forms like the
ceilidh as a sounding-board, Welsh’s touchstone is the
rave culture he knows so well. This new Scottish drama
is arguably less a breach with previous political theatre
than a fruitful branching out, but it would be wrong to
ignore fundamental shifts of emphasis. Welsh’s characters
are not the educated, respectable, law-abiding
working class figures found in much traditional fiction
and drama, nor are his communities unified in their opposition
to some faceless authority.
Contemporary Scottish theatre is tuned into popular
culture. It has passed from music hall to club land by
way of cinema, dance, drugs, football fanzines, journalism,
rap, stand-up comedy and television. Where the
content went before the phrase, the phrase now goes
before the content. It is significant that You’ll Have Had
Your Hole is set in a recording studio. Welsh draws on
club culture, mixing and sampling a variety of sounds.
The devil is in the detail, and the verve and vitality of
local idioms, but there are large themes too – cruelty,
revenge, cycles of violence, crime and punishment,
responsibility, guilt. The language of violence and the
BUY Irvine Welsh books online from and
violence of language come together in an art of suffering,
but not in silence.
Which brings us to the title of Welsh’s new play. Uttered
in posh Edinburgh parlance, the phrase “You’ll
have had your tea” has a hidden meaning. It implies a
poverty of spirit in a host’s attitude to a guest. It says:
“I’m presuming you’ve eaten and that means you’re
getting nothing from me”. This rhetorical question is
usually attributed to a middle class woman. By contrast,
getting your hole is a working class masculine term for
sexual fulfilment. Put the two together and you get the
kind of hybrid interplay characteristic of contemporary
Scottish culture.
The reason Scottish novelists are turning increasingly
to the theatre, or opting to have their work adapted for
the stage, is that they recognise a medium that crosses
borders and breaks down barriers much more readily
than film, which has lost its ability to challenge audiences.
One thinks here of Janice Galloway’s The Trick Is
To Keep Breathing (1995), James Kelman’s One, Two,
Hey! (1994) and Duncan McLean’s Julie Allardyce
(1993), and of course Irvine Welsh’s Headstate, not to
mention Trainspotting and Marabou Stork Nightmares.
It’s not so much a question of choosing between fiction
or film or theatre, as a renewed confidence in their own
voices that sees Scottish writers flitting effortlessly
between forms.
With theatre, there is always an element of risk,
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