Renton, Tommy, Franco and 'Sick Boy' - perhaps they've become part of our folk culture. This would certainly seem to be borne out by the audience who came along to the Alhambra - a lower average age than usual and a very good turnout for a Monday night! As adapted from Irvine Welsh's novel and directed by Harry Gibson, ten years on this new production is very much a play of two halves. The first act moves at helter skelter pace getting a lot of laughs along the way, not to mention the presence of a toilet on the stage and all that says about humour! Even here though the audience is suddenly pulled up by the tragedy that is unfolding on stage. After the interval the play is much darker as we witness to Tommy's (Ruaraidh Murray) decline. Essentially this production is darker than the film but not as dark as the book. Gibson has done a very good job of presenting the novel's several interweaving stories into an impressionistic and episodic drama on what is little more than a single set.Ìý This approach works so well because the action is driven by 'Renton' and in Peter Milne Gibson has an actor who is certainly up to the job. He acts as narrator as well as actor - in fact he's never off the stage! Renton ends the play as he began it with the words: "I woke up in a strange bed in a strange room covered by my own mess."Ìý This is the story, and and at the end as Begbie and Renton wait on Leith Station for a train that will never come, it is no longer funny. Renton also repeats emphatically "Life is boring and futile...Smack is an honest drug!" This is not the Edinburgh of the Festival as is pointed out on more than one occasion. There are the rich and there are the rest. It starts at birth and goes on from there - the rich go to different schools. There is a brilliant scene where, as 'Jobseekers,' Renton and Tommy both go along to an interview for a hotel job and pretend to be old boys of one of the city's more select academies. The result is not quite as intended. Even Renton has used education to his advantage.Ìý He tells us he got in to the 'O' Level class to get away from the violent Begbie. So just maybe he has a had a chance to escape all of this. Harry Gibson writes in the programme: "As a drug worker in the Gorbals in Glasgow told me, 'If you don't have a life, drugs will fill the vacuum.' As the careers of Irvine Welsh and Harry Gibson show, the palace is reached by getting education. My experience says: 'Don't do drugs till you've learned Latin'." Laura Harvey is also given a lot of work to do, not only in the role of Alison who is the pivot of the play's most shocking scene but every other female part - the victims and the strong women - with the exception of a deliberately Widow Twankee-ish cameo by Brian Alexander / Begbie as Renton's mum. My only criticism, and it really isn't that, because I don't see how it could be any other way and still keep its spirit, is that - as with the novel - you have to get your ear accustomed to the idiom. There are points when the production seems to be nothing more than 147 of ways of saying one word that we can't repeat on a ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ website but then Renton sets us straight again. Again, I'm not complaining - this IS Begbie. And, thinking about it, it is the language which is a big part of the appeal. We've had the novel, the play, the film - perhaps it's now time for the radio version! | 
