"'We've got to get the kids in,' was the patronizing mantra that used to ring around theatreland. `We've got to get them out of the clubs and the raves and the flicks and the internet caf‚s and get them back in the theatre. Harness all that energy and creativity.' We generally agreed until the first night of Trainspotting." Dominick Droomgoole [6]

<13> Upon its publication in 1993 Trainspotting became the book of choice for this new generation of youth. According to Collin, "Trainspotting was the cult text of the nineties not just because of Welsh's literary talent, but because it had struck a deep chord with anyone immersed in drug culture . . . . Welsh was more than a `rave author', but his surreal often grim yet conversely life-affirming prose expertly delineated the hedonist's headspace" (28).  Told, for the most part, through numerous first person narratives, but primarily through the voice of some time junkie, some time gyro con man, and full-time cynic Mark Renton, Welsh's novel depicts the underbelly of Edinburgh in the 1980s. It focuses primarily on a group of heroin addicts, their friends and families as they struggle with life, work, family, death, AIDS, Iggy Pop, romance, overdoses, the big score, raves, football, Sean Connery, the Festival, the filthiest toilet in Scotland, and, always, their varied addictions.

<14> The success of Welsh's novel startled many. Why? Literarily, the novel is well crafted, featuring a powerful use of dialect and a compelling ability to capture the characters' struggles. But as Collin notes, the novel spoke to a wide swath of members of myriad drug and youth cultures as it expressed a social, political and economic view parallel to their own, and the force driving the success of the book (despite its literary merits) was its audience. Simon Reynolds in his Village Voice profile of Welsh notes: "Research by his publishers has shown that a hefty proportion of Welsh's audience doesn't read any fiction at all, apart from books by himself and kindred spirits like Morvern Callar author Alan Warner" (72). His book acquired the reputation as being for those people who did not read and this aspect would be key to the successful interconnection between Generation Ecstasy and British theatre of the 90s. It only made sense that when the novel was adapted into a play by Harry Gibson, Trainspotting would appeal to those punters who had previously not gone to plays, namely those kids that Droomgoole, Stephen Daldry at the Royal Court Theatre and Richard Eyre at the Royal National Theatre were all interested in courting into their spaces.

<15> Welsh wrote for a new, untapped audience, offering up literary characters not before depicted with such graphic detail, psychological insight, and compelling literary style. As Welsh remarked in terms of the appeal of his writing: "I think that a lot of people are sick of the kind of representations of the world that we live in as a kind of bland Four Weddings and a Funeral sort of place-they want something that says a wee bit more about the society we actually live in and a wee bit more about the different cultures within that society that tend to be ignored" (Macdonald 18). Lucy Hughes-Hallett's book review in The Sunday Times noted that aspect of the novel when she noted that Trainspotting "gives voice to the silent, swaying figure at the back of the late-night bus, the one nobody wants to sit next to" (6:8). The figure at the back of the bus that we diligently avoid, refusing to make eye contact with would become a major component in the plays following shortly after the novel's debut because young British playwrights were also interested in these previously ignored individuals. Mark Ravenhill, author of Shopping and Fucking, captures this same motif in describing his plays: "You only have to wait for a bus in Camden for ten minutes to come across the people I'm writing about in the play. What surprises me is Londoners who claim to have no knowledge of this kind of life" ("Curtains Up" 21). Joe Penhall confronted this same issue in his early play, Some Voices, which dealt with the difficulties two schizophrenics face in Shepherd's Bush. In his introduction to his collected plays, he explains why he chose this topic:

I'd been living in Shepherd's Bush . . . The place was full of former mental patients and Irish and Kiwis and Croatians and drunks and drifters in amongst the media types. I'd learnt from a government white paper that the incidence of mental illness and suicide amongst the Irish in London was higher than for any other community in Britain. I wasn't surprised. Anybody who spends time in a city doing anything other than going to work and coming home understands the soullessness of city life. I'd had years on the dole and doing dead-end jobs and then a year writing journalism about people on the dole and in dead-end jobs. I felt strongly that newspaper articles weren't enough to convey the true misery and loneliness of schizophrenia, unemployment, redundancy, alchoholism, domestic violence and everything else that was going on around me. (ix-x)

Unlike Synge who traveled to the Aran Islands to find something to write about, Welsh and the young playwrights of the 90s merely had to look outside their flats to find literary inspiration from the ignored underbelly of discontent and misery, which had grown steadily during Margaret Thatcher and her conservative government's long reign.

<16> Similar to John Osborne's Jimmy Porter of Look Back in Anger (1956), another seminal character and text capturing the essence of a powerful and influential youth movement, Welsh's characters provided the same truculent urgency, powerful manner of linguistic and stylistic bravado, and theatrically spontaneous voice for lower class British youths, who had for the most part evaporated from the British stage in the 1980s and early 1990s. However, Welsh's characters distance themselves from the familiar lower class political discontents in the leftist plays of Osborne and other similar minded writers. While Jimmy Porter ranted about church bells, the fading imperial nature of Britain and pompous Sunday editorials, Welsh's characters rants are far more personal, far more primal, and far more violently etched in the primordial ooze of a base existence. And equally different are the means of escape that each employs. Jimmy and Allison use their linguistic foreplay game of bears and squirrels to escape from the socially and emotionally violent discord of their class differences. At the end of the play Jimmy says to Allison:

We'll be together in our bear's cave, and our squirrel's drey, and we'll live on honey, and nuts . . . And we'll sing songs about ourselves-about warm trees and snug caves, and lying in the sun. And you'll keep those big eyes on my fur, and help me keep my claws in order, because I'm a bit of a soppy, scruffy sort of bear. And I'll see that you keep that sleek, busy tail glistening as it should, because you're a very beautiful squirrel, but you're none too bright either, so we've got to be careful. (Osborne 96)

In Trainspotting heroin and its powerful corporeal and mental effects replace their tired game. As Alison says, after an injection of heroin from Sick Boy: "That beats any meat injection. That beats any fuckin cock in the world!" (Welsh 26). In the world of Osborne's play Alison and Jimmy, despite all their troubles, still are able to rely on their own physical embrace as a form of overcoming (albeit briefly) all their woes. They have one another. However, in Trainspotting the couple has now been reduced to one, represented by the self-embrace of Alison as she slumps to the floor, relishing the internal, singular pleasure that the drug provides, foregrounding the high of the drug before everything else including the primal, natural pleasure of sexual intercourse, which is the only place where Allison and Jimmy are equal.

<17> Harry Gibson, who adapted and directed the stage version of Trainspotting, perfectly captured the essence of Welsh's novel. And his adaptation from its opening moments announces that a new type of drama is in the works. The play opens with a theatrical explosion not only from the mouth of Renton with his profane and graphically descriptive language but also from his sleeping body which during the night has released all of its bilious contents onto his girlfriend's duvet and bed. [7]

Fuck! . . . Ah woke up in a strange bed, in a strange room, covered in ma own mess. Ah hud pished the bed. Ah hud puked up in the bed. Ah shat masel in the bed. Ah slide outay bed. Ah pick up the duvet. Ah look down. The bed is a total fucking mess. The wee pink carnations on a white background're drowning in toxic brown pollution. I huv tae gather itup in the bottom sheet like chips in a paper and then wrap it up in the duvet cover, sortay crush it intae a ball, making sure thir's nae leakage, ken, and stow it uner the bed. (Welsh 15)

Our soiled hero tries to spirit the fecal, vomit and urine stained sheets out of the house, but his girlfriend's mother won't let him. She insists on washing them for him, to which he protests greatly.

Mrs Houston steals across the flair taewards us n makes a grab fir ma bundle. She widnae be denied. Ah pull it tae me, tae my chest; but Mrs Houston is fast as fuck an deceptively strong. . . . The sheets flew up in the air-n a pungent shower ay shite, alcoholic sick n vile pish splashed oot across the scene. (16)

On the 29th of March 1995 Trainspotting made its London stage debut (having previously played at Glasgow's Citizens Theatre and Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre) at the Bush Theatre. On that night the play belched forth its "pungent shower ay shite, alcholic sick n vile pish splash[ing] oot" and the "kids" that Dromgoole, Daldry and other practitioners so actively sought arrived in abundance, lapping up every minute of the stage performance of the novel which had completely captured the imagination and spirit of the disaffected British youth, who had grown up under Thatcher.

<18> In The Full Room, Dominic Dromgoole describes the night the kids arrived and their appearance in the raised tier seats of the Bush theatre made the theatre practitioners think twice about wanting these kids ever to return to their houses.

They were a fucking nightmare. They smoked cigarettes, joints, even heroin (something of a theatrical first that), they talked amongst themselves, picked fights, spilt drinks and created whatever mayhem they could. About three-quarters of the way through the first half, an old theatre nightmare was made manifest, when first one, then another two, then four, then eventually about forty, simply got up and walked out, passing right across the stage. The depression this induced was quickly alleviated when they all en masse walked back in. They'd just nipped out for a piss.
    By the interval, the person on front of house looked like a Polish calvary officer a week into the Second World War. By the end, a group of us were in earnest discussion: `The kids, how can we get them out? How can we get them back into the clubs, raves, etc. Where are all those nice people in sweaters?' Needless to say, no one could be kept out, and the show was a storm wherever it went, in Scotland, at the Bush, on tour, even in the West End. (279)

Streaming into theatres around the country came the raucous, youthful, rave going, E taking, techno dancing kids. Harry Gibson remarked: "We were told by lots of regional theatres that they'd never been so full for years" (qtd. in Reisz 61). Most significant though is the play's transfer to the West End. The appearance and decorum of this previously unseen brood in the lobbies and stalls of the hallowed West End made a powerful and, for some, uncomfortable statement about the changing composition and philosophy of London audiences as well as the writers for the stage. Harry Gibson's remark to Andy Lavender etched out part of the rebellious attitude of these new theatre patrons: "The thought of doing [Trainspotting] in the West End gives you a sense of triumph and a sense of subversion. . . It's kind of a buzz to know you're seeing this filthy piece of work in the home of The Mousetrap, or was, until it moved" (35). In effect, the staid, comported, respectable, West End British theatre, which in the 1980s and the early 1990s had been defined, for the most part, by the easy comedies of Alan Ayckbourn, the multi-layered plays of Tom Stoppard, directors making their names on revivals, and highly-profitable and exportable British musical, was now under attack.

<19> The "kids," unlike the usual middle-aged, upper to middle class audience, vocally invested in the action on stage, creating an atmosphere akin to a panto for the twentysomething age group. Carole Woddis in the Glasgow Herald wrote that the audience at the Glasgow premiere "loved the incipient anarchy of it, they groaned with the desperate degradation of it, and they thrilled to the dramatic urgency of it" (qtd. in Reisz 61). Their challenge to theatrical decorum was not limited to their vocal participation. Michael Billington's review in The Guardian of the play's West End transfer to the Ambassadors Theatre made reference to the audience as being "nattily clad" (2:10). Amidst the kids and the theatre critics were typical British theatergoers who did not quite know what to make of the whole Trainspotting experience. The most apt representation of their reaction can be found in Benedict Nightingale's review of the production that played at Whitehall Theatre.

    "Er, I suppose the second half is much like the first?" a tweedy old gentleman asked me in the interval. "We're wondering if it's really aimed at our age group."
    He was right on both counts, and left with his wife 20 minutes later, no doubt cursing a play- title deceptively reminiscent of happy boyhood days recording the numbers of puffers at King's Cross. (17)

Truly, the kids that the theatre directors had wanted to attract so badly had arrived and in turn everyone noticed. No more could it be business as usual.

"This is us": Generation Ecstasy and the Drama of the 90s

As the audience was shuffling out of the Bush theatre one night [after seeing Samuel Adamson's Clock and Whistles], . . . I fell in behind Michael Codron, the venerated and venerable West End producer. He turned to his friend: `I liked that very much,' he said. Then, after a pause, he whispered, `Was it any good?' `Yes. Yes, it was . . . very good,' his friend replied. Michael looked happy, `Was it? Oh good, I am glad.' I was delighted, not by the approval, nor by the insecurity, but by the suggestion that no one knew the rules anymore.-Dominic Droomgoole [8]

<20> Reading reviews of Trainspotting, as well as similar plays like Adamson's Clocks and Whistles (1996), Ravenhill's Shopping and Fucking, Upton's Ashes and Sand, Prichard's Essex Girls, McDonagh's The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Butterworth's Mojo, and many others, one cannot help but notice that Benedict, Billington and their middle-aged contemporaries were excited about the renaissance of new theatrical voices, releasing the theatre from its somnolent, catatonic slumber. However, they were a tad bit wary of not only the youthful, raucous audience invading the West End in search of the theatricalization of their own stories, experiences and fears but also the violent, graphic sexuality, and profane subject matter and life philosophies emerging on the stages. In his review of Trainspotting Billington admitted to his own "moral queasiness" with the play (2:10). Never the less these playwrights, despite their vehement protests against being classified together, share a similar mantra, identified by Harry Gibson when he described the appeal of Trainspotting: "It's written from within the culture, where everybody's saying: This is us, listen to us" (Lavender 35). Gibson's description of these emerging voices, needing and wanting to be heard and have their own stories told and explained fostered the success of Welsh's Trainspotting. While it brought the audience in originally, new writers like Ravenhill, Penhall, Upton, Marber, Kane and others kept them coming back to the stage to see snapshots of life in Britain in the 90s. Even though Peter Morris was remarking on the power of Kane's writing, his comment can be applied to her contemporaries as well. "The one thing Sarah Kane did accomplish was to convince unhappy twenty-year-olds that theatre wasn't as much a sham and a spectacle as everything else the world offers them" (Morris 151). Like the drug fueled, music driven raves, the new theatre of the mid-1990s provided Generation Ecstasy with an alternative outlet from their daily struggles.

<21> No doubt, the Bush theatre succeeded in attracting the Generation Ecstasy kids, but as we have seen not everyone was happy with their taking a seat in the theatre. Dromgoole's most revealing "they were a fucking nightmare," Billington's tchetchy "nattily clad," the tweedy old gentleman's abashed departure, and the entire Bush Theatre's staff overwhelming desire "to get them out" suggests the shock and dismay over the audience members they had all so achingly desired to capture. And yet, when their reactions are put in context with the reactions of "regular" Britains of the English countryside who found themselves surrounded by the kids of Generation Ecstasy as they took their smiley face, E trip show from the clubs and abandoned warehouses of London on the road, we find that not much has changed from the late-1980s and the mid-1990s.

<22> Tony Colston-Hayter, one of the most public figures of the Acid House revolution, having handcuffed himself to a talk show host during an interview, planned the first foray into the countryside. Tired of police and gang interference, he hired busses and moved his patrons to an equestrian center near his home. Sheryl Garratt described the effect of his countryside rave had on the movement as a whole:

At the peak of the night, the lights went off, the place filled with dry ice and DJ Steve Proctor played the opening bars of Richard Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra ... As the music built towards a climax, a green laser cut across the smoke-filled room, and all the DJ could see was disembodied hands reaching towards it through the mist, like an entity from John Carpenter's The Fog. All of the London club promoters who had advised Colston- Hayter not to waste his money were there, awestruck. The agenda had changed: this was no longer about club nights, one-off parties. It was events, about spectacle. (144-5)

While the Colston-Hayter gathering changed the rules of the rave scene, just as these new playwrights have done on the British stage, both dramatically upping the ante, the morning after also had an important impact as the denizens of the countryside came face to face with this previously only urban-based youth movement. Charlie Colston-Hayter, his sister, said:

It was beautiful sunshine, birds singing, dew on everything and it was sparkling and wonderful, a new day. And all of a sudden this tractor came round the corner. This bloke had probably driven that tractor round that corner every day for forty- five years, and now he's hit by bedlam. Boys and girls in tie-dye, dancing with flowers in their hair. You should have seen his face. Can you imagine what he'd go back and say to his wife? (Garratt 145)

<23> A similar example comes from Simon of London who describes his experience of going to a Sunrise rave in June of 1989. His description of the stunned villagers finding their small hamlet overrun by British youths seeking that evening's designated rave site perfectly parallels the same overwhelming feeling that Dromgoole and others experienced in the face of such a group of youths pouring into their theatres.

Eventually, we got to the turn-off and found ourselves suddenly in a village side-road. The gardens of the houses came right down to the road, and the road was bumper to bumper with cars. There were people standing in their gardens in their pyjamas and looking out of their windows in their dressing-gowns, wondering what the hell was going on: the sleepy village road suddenly had cars three abreast, all packed with sweaty, gurning kids with their music pumping. Nothing could have come the other way even if it had wanted to. (Harrison 141)

Later, Simon describes the reaction of the hamlet's overwhelmed constabulatory force come to break up the thousands of ravers.

And there, silhouetted in the door, were two tiny figures. And even against the increasing daylight we could make out that they were uniformed coppers, and that each of them was holding a push bike! . . . And the younger one had his helmet under his arm, and he wandered in looking totally gobsmacked-they had obviously never seen anything like it in their whole careers of policing a tiny, sleepy, suburban village. (141- 2)

Gobsmacked indeed.

<24> Tiny hamlets and police forces throughout Britain experienced the same shock of the influx of this youthful band. And yet, Simon's gleeful description of the townsfolk and two police officers so shocked by the expansive infiltration of their town by thousands of youths during the summer of 1989 provides a perfect closing metaphor for the reaction of audience members (paralleled by the town folk) and theatre practitioners and reviewers (the constabulary and others) to the influx of similar minded audiences descending on the Bush, Royal Court and other theatres in London in the mid-90s.

* * *

<25> So where does this leave us now in 2003? Are the youthful punters still flocking to the London theatres? Has this new youthful presence of playwrights continued to dominate the theatrical scene in London? The answer to both questions is no. In September 2002 at the University of the West of England, Bristol Aleks Sierz, who named and defined the "In-Yer-Face" theatre movement, announced to a group of academics attending the "In-Yer-Face"? British Drama in the 1990s conference that "In-Yer-Face" theatre was now officially defunct. By the end of the 1990s many of the young writers so bent on changing the system ultimately became part of the system (Mark Ravenhill, Joe Penhall) or opted out of the system entirely (Sarah Kane, Phyllis Nagy, Rebecca Prichard). With the absence of these voices, the young audience had no reason to return to the London theatres. Even stage adaptations of Irvine Welsh's later novels never found the same critical or popular success as the novel or stage version of Trainspotting, which may be one reason why his most recent book Porno (2002) drops back in on Renton and the gang.

<26> And yet, the few years of intersection between Generation Ecstasy and the London theatre are worth highlighting. Just as Generation Ecstasy broke all the rules and redefined the club scene of the 1980s from its infatuation with style and glamour to baggy, adolescent like clothing (why the better to dance and sweat in, my dear) and uninhibited dancing, the young playwrights of the mid-1990s moved the theatre from its light, frothy, commercial, revival based focus, turning it more toward the baser elements of existence and survival during the Thatcher and post-Thatcher years. Similarly, these young playwrights and their audiences no longer followed the established rules set down for theatrical conventions. Aleks Reisz suggests that: "Picking among the tattered remains of modernism, and encouraged by post-modernism's notion that `anything goes,' theatre shook off the style police and began to explore a new-found freedom" (36). That attitude of "anything goes" also perfectly fits the spirit of Generation Ecstasy.

<27> It is important then to conclude by returning to Dromgoole and the other artistic directors' interest in getting the "kids" into the theatre. In regard to the plays of the mid-90s and after, the "kids" can be classified in two ways: the audience and the playwrights themselves. The main critical and academic focus on this new emergence of theatrical voices has been and will continue to be on the latter group and for understandable reasons. However, we must not forget to pay attention to the other kids who were also crucial to the theatrical resurgence in Britain. No doubt, in looking back at the theatre in the 1990s Trainspotting will be, at most, probably a footnote, when compared with the other plays of the decade. After all, Ella Wildridge, writing in Theatre in a Cool Climate, aptly remarks, ""When young people ventured into theatres to see Trainspotting they went in search of the latest thing. Cool" (Wildridge 161). And while that is essentially true, her identification of the play's "coolness" is what makes it so culturally important in raising the awareness of the "kids" to the British theatre and what was transpiring there. With Trainspotting and similar themed plays in the ensuing years, the theatre audience made an important, albeit brief, shift as Generation Ecstasy found a similar minded attitude and place in the stalls of London's theatres.

Works Cited

Billington, Michael. Review of Trainspotting, by Irvine Welsh, adapt. by Harry Gibson, The Guardian 18 Dec. 1995: 2:10.

Collin, Matthew. Altered State: The Story of Ecstasy Culture and Acid House. 2nd ed. London: Serpent's Tail, 1998.

Crysell, Andy. "Ibiza: The Discovery." Ibiza: Inspired Images from the Island of Dance. Ed. Ben Turner. London: Ebury Press, 1999. 26-49.

"Curtains Up," Midweek, 24-27 Feb 1997: 21.

Davenport-Hines, Richard. The Pursuit of Oblivion: A Social History of Drugs. London: Phoenix, 2002.

Dromgoole, Dominic. The Full Room: An A-Z of Contemporary Playwriting. London: Methuen, 2000.

Foucault, Michel. "Governmentality." Power. Trans. Robert Hurley and others. Ed. James D. Faubion. New York: New Press, 2000. 201-222.

Garratt, Sheryl. Adventures in Wonderland: A Decade of Club Culture. London: Headline, 1998.

Harrison, Melissa, ed. High Society: The Real Voices of Club Culture. London: Piatkus, 1998.

Hughes-Hallett, Lucy. Review of Trainspotting, by Irvine Welsh. The Times 15 Aug. 1993: 6:8.

Lavender, Andy. "West End Gets Smack in the Face." The Times 13 Dec. 1995: 35.

MacDonald, Kevin. "Postcards from the Edge." Independent on Sunday 28 Jan. 1996: Sunday Review 18.

Morris, Peter. "Brand of Kane." Arete 4 (Winter 2000): 143- 52.

Nightingale, Benedict. Review of Trainspotting, by Irvine Welsh, adapt. by Harry Gibson, The Times 16 March 1996: 17.

Penhall, Joe. Preface. Plays: One. London: Methuen, 1998: ix-xv.

Push and Mireille Silcott. The Book of E: All About Ecstasy. London: Omnibus Press, 2000.

Osborne, John. Look Back in Anger. New York: Penguin, 1957.

Reisz, Aleks. In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today. London: Faber and Faber, 2001.

Reynolds, Simon. "Filthy Mind." The Village Voice 15 Sept. 1998: 72.

---. Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture. New York: Routledge, 1998.

Shapiro, Harry. Waiting for the Man: The Story of Drugs and Popular Music. 3rd ed. London: Helter Skelter, 1999.

Welsh, Irvine. Trainspotting and Headstate. London: Minerva, 1996.

Wildridge, Ella. "New Plays-We Need Them." Theatre in a Cool Climate. Eds. Vera Gottlieb and Colin Chambers. Oxford: Amber Lane, 1999. 159-168.

End Notes

[1] A number of book length studies, besides the ones cited below, dissect the varying components of this youth movement, including Ben Malbon, Clubbing: Dancing, Ecstasy and Vitality (London: Routledge, 1999); Steve Redhead et. al., eds., The Club Cultures Reader: Readings in Popular Cultural Studies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997); Simon Reynolds, Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture (New York: Routledge, 1998); and Sarah Thornton, Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital (Cambridge: Polity, 1995). [^]

[2] Andy Crysell, "Ibiza: The Discovery," Ibiza: Inspired Images from the Island of Dance, ed. Ben Turner (London: Ebury Press, 1999) 49. [^]

[3] Since the focus of this article is on the London theatre, my summary of the rise of Acid House and Generation Ecstasy in Britain is limited to the London-Ibiza connection. Concurrent with London's developing rave scene in the late 1980s, Manchester (which soon took on the moniker of Madchester) experienced a renaissance of club culture too, specifically at the club The Hacienda. For more details about the rise of club culture in Northern England, see Matthew Collin, Altered State: The Story of Ecstasy Culture and Acid House, 2nd ed. (London: Serpent's Tail, 1998); Reynolds; and Tony Wilson, Twenty-Four Hour Party People: What the Sleeve Notes Never Tell You (London: Channel Four, 2002). [^]

[4] See Alan Warner's novel Morvern Callar which captures the duality of the island experience as his titular character first experiences the painfully embarrassing 18-30 Club tour in a San Antonio-like English tourist town, before opting to leave her fellow country partygoers and stay in the more native, club scene town down the road, extremely similar to Ibiza town. [^]

[5] Reynolds also notes that as the effects of Ecstasy began to lose its communal inducing abilities (the more you take of it, the less on an impact it has on your system) the thug matches quickly returned in the 1990s. [^]

[6] Dominic Dromgoole, The Full Room: An A-Z of Contemporary Playwriting (London: Methuen, 2000) 277. [^]

[7] It's worth remarking briefly here on the difference between the play and film version (directed by Danny Boyle and adapted by John Hodge), which is the most popular and best-known representation of Welsh's characters. It too features the above scene of the soiled bed covers (this time with Spud). Gibson's adaptation is much more accurate in its representation of the scenes in the novel, including a harrowing scene of Tommy shooting up into his penis; an extended scene of the death of Dawn, Alison's baby, to cot death, malnutrition and neglect; the violence of Franco Begbie; the downfall of Tommy from a clean footballer to a dead AIDS carrier junkie; and the play's final scene where Begbie encounters his father in an abandoned railway station. The tenor, tone and direction are far less glitzy than the film version with its compelling, best selling soundtrack, furious editing, crisp camera angles, and Hodge's seamless screenplay. Numerous characters are dropped and the story tellers have changed for dramatic economy as well as financial economy. The show was written with only three male actors and one female actor in mind. Doubling and tripling occurs and in doing so, makes the piece tourable. In the novel, the embarrassing bed scene actually occurs to Spud and not Renton. [^]

[8] Droomgoole, 1. [^]