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Citizens Theatre Stalls, Glasgow, UK >>>

1999

Guy Chapman and David Johnson

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I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com
or the playwright direct where their email is shown at the top of the page

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Adaptation

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from novel by Irvine Welsh

With Irvine Welsh you soon know the sordid patch of world you are in, and that what lies ahead will be buggery, druggery, treachery, killing, racism, homophobia and pride in being Scottish, Harry Gibson adapted Irvine Welsh's first two novels, helped to make an international success of Trainspotting, and has done a remarkable job on this dense slab of a book. I didn't like it all that much, but that's not really important, [didn't always hear what Tam Dean Burn's wretchedly horrible Detective Sergeant Robertson was saying either, because there's often music playing at the same time. But this fits the style of the novel, where it's sometimes a job to make out where in Robertson's rotten life we happen to be. Welsh demands careful reading to make sense of his jump-cut style, and you need sharp wits to follow Robertson's swerving confessions. The man's in his Edinburgh office recapping his past few days at work, the last days before Christmas. There's the murder of a gay Ghanaian to solve, a 15-year-old girl to force into sex, a rival for promotion to stitch up, hardcore porn to get from a fellow Mason. And there's weeping to be done for the wife who left him, and presents to forget to buy for his teenage daughter. There is masturbation and drinking and frantic eating of terrible pies, one of which leaves a tapeworm in his gut. The worm grows with phenomenal speed, but this is a trivial quibble since it also starts giving voice to Robertson's miserable history. From the worni we pick up -hints of why he is the man he is. To some extent, anyway, and to more of an extent than in Welsh's previous work, where the details of brutal behaviour have sometimes been presented as a given, and the absence of convincing links to a past has made the squalid crimes feel gratuitous. Burn's features are goblin-like, joylessly grinning, and from the start his performance is theatrically convincing as a worm-eaten bully who has clapped his inner self in irons yet cannot prevent it screaming. The short scene in which he plays his wife is the first sign of the tenderness that craves attention; he is also sinuous and sinister as the worm.
Jeremy Kingston, The Times

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, UK >>>

2001

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I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com
or the playwright direct where their email is shown at the top of the page

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Adaptation

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from novel by Irvine Welsh

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, UK >>>

1996

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I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com
or the playwright direct where their email is shown at the top of the page

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Adaptation

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from novel by Irvine Welsh

Man In The Moon Theatre, London >>>

1998

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I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com
or the playwright direct where their email is shown at the top of the page

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Play/Drama

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Citizens Theatre Stalls, Glasgow, UK >>>

1994

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Minerva Press, 1996

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If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise
(below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

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Adaptation

4

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from novel by Irvine Welsh

bleak , black, tragically funny tale of a wasted generation destroyed not by madness but by heroin