4 Play – Irvine Welsh
[collected scripts of plays based on Welsh's work]

See all books by Irvine Welsh at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com



[Note: this is the complete text of a syndicated interview with Harry Gibson provided to the press to promote the 10th anniversary production of Trainspotting, the play based on Irvine Welsh's novel of the same name.

Gibson wrote the script for the stage adaptation of Trainspotting and directed both the original production and the new production which begins in 2006. See the Trainspotting - The Play site for full details.

Spike also interviewed Gibson at the time of the original production in 1996: Harry Gibson: Trainspotting: Expletives Repeated]

So 10 years on, why the revival?

HG: Love, I think. I mean, audiences love seeing it, actors love performing it, and I love directing it. I’ve done Glasgow, Toronto, New York, the Australia tour and I reworked it for the Edinburgh Festival, so it felt like stand up comedy in a tent, and for the West End so it could fill a big old fashioned theatre; so this is my seventh time. And I know it’s a special show for the producers because it was ten years ago when they fell in love with it except that Mark Goucher had to look away when the needles came out. Well, they picked it up and put it on the road and got a smash hit and a shelf full of awards, so for them it’s pure nostalgia. So here we go trainspotting again.

How did it go down in New York did they get it?

HG: It upset them. Sympathy for junkies isn’t big on Broadway. And the language is way too bad for uptown folks. But for eight weeks it was a must see for Soho artists and Greenwich Village actors. The movie actor Brian Denehey said to me, “That is the darkest show I have ever seen.” And he’s been to some very dark places. Australia though was the opposite. One guy said to me, “That’s the funniest first ten minutes of a show I ever saw”. They just sat there eating popcorn and laughing like mad. The thing is, the play has a personality like all good plays which changes from cast to cast. Sometimes it’s a black comedy, like the movie, sometimes it goes deeper, really tragic.

Yes, what about the film? I mean, this isn’t the play of the film is it?

HG: This is the play of Irvine Welsh’s original book. I read a first edition and we had it onstage (at The Glasgow Citz’s) nine months later. We thought it would be good for four weeks in the small studio, but on the first night we had queues wrapped around the building and by noon the next day the whole run was sold out. We revived it six months later in a bigger studio and it sold out again. That was the one which Danny Boyle (the movie’s director) and his team came to see, but naturally a play and a film are two different animals. I love the movie. It’s a brilliant caper-film. It reminded me of those Beatles & Monkees films with lads leaping around to music like ‘Hey, hey we’re the Junkees, and we just junky around’. One big difference between the play and the film apart from the fact that the play just uses one set and four actors and you can smell it happening in front of you is that the movie ends up being the hero’s getaway, while the play stays with the trainspotters, left standing in the ruined old Leith railway station waiting for trains that will never come to get them a away from it all. Irvine liked that ending. Truer to life.

So Trainspotting entered the language?

HG: Spotting is everywhere now. In fact language is a big part of Trainspotting’s appeal. People write dissertations about it. The play has 147 cunts. In Edinburgh housing schemes, I explain to people, cunt is a laddish term of endearment. You can say “Y’cunt-ye” to a mate and it’s quite cuddly. You would not call a vagina a cunt; a vagina is (excuse my language) a f*n*y. Translators have some difficulties; I think the play’s been translated into 17 languages now, and I am waiting for the Japanese version because I’m told the Japanese don’t have dirty swearwords; mind you it might be the maddest version ever.

The culture of the production transforms the show; the Icelandic version which I saw in Reykjavik looked like a saga; our hero’s mother appeared out of a mist like a troll, with a giant wooden spoon. In Paris, it was “La Haine” type streetkids, playing around mostly on scaffolding. The Dresden director must have done a lot of very special workshops games on because I don’t remember writing parts for four blue eyed blonde boys or asking them to do a buggery dance; this went on for three hours – but still, it got 17 curtain calls. Trainspotting gets done all over the world: Canada down to Mexico across to New Zealand and up to Hong Kong – every country has its trainspotters. At the moment the National Theatre of Romania is doing it in Cluj.

So you’re not short of a bob or two?

HG: Well, let me put it this way. I wish I’d made is a full-scale musical. I might be rich. As it is, it’s just a small show for studios, so cheques do drop on the doormat from time to time but only small ones. We’re talking the price of dinner. So I have not given up my day job. Which is theatre anyway. People ask me, “What made you do this?”, and the boring answer is that it’s my job.

I do plays and I turn Irvine’s books into plays because he is a writer of foul genius. I’ve done the play versions of five of his novels. The latest one is Porno, the sequel to Trainspotting about Sick Boy’s attempt to become a porn baron, but for the first time, I’ve got a play which no one will touch. I think they think it might be pornographic, and it isn’t….very. I think it’s beautiful. But then I think every show I do is beautiful, however wild and in your face it is. It’s got to be beautiful theatre. Otherwise it’s a mess. I saw some Oxford students do it last year, and they fucked it up so bad I wanted to walk out and weep. I needed much vodka comfort.

Isn’t “in-yer-face” a whole style of theatre now?

HG: So they say. Actually, theatre’s been doing in-yer-face for years. It isn’t about outrageous acts, it really means your actors address the audience directly, they don’t pretend they are being spied on through a glass wall. Audiences really like that. It makes a play more like rock’n'roll. Well, like The Fall’s idea of rock’n'roll – they’re Irv’s favourite band. So it feels rough, but actually its cunning and beautiful, it draws you into a dream just like Shakespeare where a Prologue tells the punters what’s going to happen and the hero opens his heart in soliloquies, and you’re drawn into a Midsummer Night’s Dream, or King Lear’s nightmare; now that’s pretty “in yer-face” – “Out Vile Jelly!”

Defining the arts into movements and schools is an intellectual’s pastime. Like Irvine’s use of language it’s interesting to philologists but to many ordinary punters Trainspotting is just a great dirty book like Lady Chatterley’s Lover or The Naked Lunch. And language makes a great paint stripper. Used like a tool and my actors know exactly when to say “fuck” – it can cut through walls of pretension and prejudice. Scholars have called Irvine’s style “dirty realism” and my style “in-yer- face” but we’re just following our literary and theatrical ancestors to reach people’s hearts and minds, And people keep coming back for more.

On tour, Trainspotting keeps bringing new people into theatres; theatre managers cry out happily, “We’ve never sold so much lager”. Of course, theatres have to make a special arrangements; at the end of the interval at the Citzs we used to send a usher out to ring a bell in the car park, where customers had popped out for a spliff. And staff do find customers in odd places, let’s just say couples have been known to get carried away, round the back of the stalls. Occasionally someone gets carried out by the paramedics or policemen, but this is rare, There have been no riots yet!

How does all this affect the actors?

HG: One or two of the actors did take their research a bit too far. There was some scraping -up off the ground. But we’ve never lost anyone. The competition to act in Trainspotting is fierce, so we can cast people who are not only fine actors but know the lifestyle, We don’t cast innocents.

Have you ever cast anyone famous?

HG: We’ve cast actors who became famous afterwards. Our first Mark Renton was Ewen Bremner who went on to play Spud in the film an is now a wealthy movie star. In the West End our Alison was played by the amazing Michelle Gomez, who you now see on TV a lot she’s the HEAT magazine girl. And when I saw Lord of The Rings, there was one of my Tommies – Billy Boyd! This kind of starspotting makes watching films and TV a bit weird for me me- well everyone in The Business, you want to get into the drama, but then an old friend pops up and punctures the illusion. I mean, Gollum you look into his eyes and you know it’s Andy Serkis! And you go “he was in a show of mine!” Which no one wants to know and you get shushed.

The Sexual Life Of The Camel?

HG: Ah. Yes

Didn’t you bet someone that you could write a play about masturbation?

HG: It was the first night party of Trainspotting and I did get into a conversation about writing a play about anything, and wanking did come up, and I did write and won a bet, which I think was a bottle of malt whisky, or maybe a case, but I can’t remember who I made it with, so I never collected! And the play was given a reading at The Royal Court which Andy “Gollum” Serkis was in, but it’s never been professionally staged, which may be because people think it pornographic, which it sort of is…

In a beautiful way?

HG: Exactly! Next question.

How have things changed since 1995, in terms of the drugs scene. Will this new production still strike a chord?

HG: It was 1995, but Irvine was going back to the 80s, when heroin-use surged in Edinburgh and it was Thatcher’s Britain and getting messed up and wasted was like defiant and political. And then getting on an E was the way to love. For a century every different drug-craze was hailed as the way to paradise, or the doors of paradise or the road of excess leading to the palace of wisdom, or just a great way to celebrate being rich or escape being poor hashish, acid, speed, coke, E, and you can go back to champagne cocktails for toffs, absinthe for poets, opium for factory workers, laudanum for stressed gentle folk, mother’s ruin gin for ruined mothers and urchins.

In Trainspotting, the book and play, we’re clear about the thrills and the buzz of defiance, but it’s like William Burroughs, the American junky novelist who tried everything and especially enjoyed morphine, he realised something was wrong; he said, “I spent two years gazing at my foot”. He got tunnel vision, and was disappearing, but then he started to see the light, the bigger picture what he saw as a great conspiracy. Well, in Trainspotting, you see that the light at the end of the tunnel is the light of an oncoming train. You can’t leave the theatre unshocked. Now I think that the whole Trainspotting phenomenon has been part of a gradual turnaround of opinion, at least ( and maybe most important because we write the copy for society) among intellectuals and the mediafolk

We are more grown up about drugs. We’re less inclined to idealise or demonise drugs. Society as a whole is not less inclined to TAKE them because humans have always taken drugs, we might even have become human by doing so but we hear less bullshit about drugs being either instant death or the road to excess leading to the palace of wisdom. In truth, the road of witless excess normally leads to the A & E room and the grave. Our realism is good.

Drugs are something you probably should try so long as you don’t have to. If you have to take drugs, it’s time for a reality check. As a drug worker in The Gorbals in Glasgow told me “If you have a life, you can do some drugs; 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 the Latin”.

Much more about Irvine Welsh is at irvinewelsh.com

[Spike note - this article was written in December 1997 for the now defunct Canadian online magazine Can Say. With the recent furore in the UK after seven Conservative Shadow Cabinet ministers admitted smoking pot, it seemed worth republishing. Despite there being a couple of bits which make me wince, I've left it intact].

Something strange is occurring within Britain at the end of 1997. After two decades of media demonisation, there are faint glimmers of intelligence visible concerning the issue of drugs. Labour MP Paul Flynn has publicly stated that the war on drugs has failed and prohibition should be abandoned; the British Medical Association recently voted overwhelmingly for the legalisation of cannabis for medical purposes; convicted dope smuggler Howard Marks has become a best-selling author and bona fide celebrity, even standing for parliament at the last election; while The Independent newspaper has begun a high profile campaign for cannabis’ complete legalisation. Even a year ago, the suggestion that any of these events would have come to pass would have been met with derision. What has brought about this distinct change in attitudes from the most traditional voices in society?

The simple answer would be Trainspotting. The phenomenal success of the film and Irvine Welsh’s novel of the same name brought the realities and reasons for drug use into the mainstream for the first time. It became the second most successful British film of all time, beaten only by the diametrically opposed Four Weddings And A Funeral. But why would so many people pay to see a film which unflinchingly documents the misery and degradation of heroin addiction? Because, beyond its plotline, Trainspotting also caught the reason that underlies virtually all of the country’s drug use, whether it be heroin, ecstasy, acid, speed, dope or whatever – and that reason is the attempt to feel fully alive.

You didn’t need to take heroin to understand and empathise with Trainspotting’s characters. Renton’s “Choose Life” speech has taken on iconic status in Britain because it succinctly states everything that’s wrong with the Thatcherite dream. Trainspotting was the loudest articulation of the chemical generation’s rage against the Conservative government, who for 17 years tried to make Britain conform to a materialist vision and destroy anything that disagreed with it. Taking part in Britain’s dance culture – and so taking drugs – was a way of refusing to be part of that vision, even if you did have to come down the next day.

The threat which Britain’s dance culture posed to the government was shown by the harshness with which they attempted to repress it, most infamously with the Criminal Justice Act which gave draconian measures to the police both to prevent and break up any gathering with a sound system “playing a succession of repetitive beats”. It was the most extreme step the government took since the beginnings of ecstasy culture in Britain in 1987 with the arrival of acid house. In his essential book Altered State, Matthew Collin charts the development of ecstasy culture from its birth to the present day, documenting in passing the vast sums of taxpayers money spent by the police unsuccessfully attempting to shut down raves and come to grips with the dance explosion. As the cover quote from Irvine Welsh puts it, “At last somebody has written the real history of the last ten years”.

Like Nicholas Saunders’ seminal E Is For Ecstasy before it, Altered State’s portrayal of Britain’s chemical generation points out one essential fact never acknowledged by the media establishment: that taking drugs recreationally neither necessarily makes you an addict nor destroys your life. To paraphrase the late great American comedian Bill Hicks – “When I took drugs, I never murdered anyone, never robbed anyone, never raped anyone, never beat anyone, never lost a job, a house, a car, a wife or kids – just laughed my ass off, and went about my day. Sorry.”

The vast majority of recreational drug users in Britain share a similar experience. How else to explain the huge rise in consumption over the last ten years? If the drugs were as dangerous as the British media makes out, why aren’t there more Ecstasy-related deaths? If 500,000 tablets of Ecstasy are consumed per week in Britain, then the risk of death is 1 in 3.7 million. Compare that to 1 death in 600,000 for a skiing holiday in Switzerland or 1 death in 85,000 for parachute jumps, and the gulf between the reality and rhetoric of drug-taking becomes apparent. These, incidentally, are the British government’s own statistics.

It’s precisely the realisation of that gulf which is beginning to seep through to those in the higher echelons of power. Combined with the prevalence of drugs as a reference point through all areas of contemporary culture – books, film, music, art – the reality of drug use is inescapable. More and more voices, including police chiefs and MPs, are acknowledging that the war on drugs has failed – consumption has continued to rise in spite of the government’s harshest efforts. Indeed, the police are about to introduce their own drug tests on new police officers because they come from a generation where drug use is common.

This disparity between misinformed ideas about drug use and real information has been tackled directly by Kevin Williamson in his new book Drugs And The Party Line. Williamson was one of the founders of Rebel Inc., the magazine turned publishing house which first published Trainspotting back in 1993. This book is set to play a pivotal role in the revision of attitudes towards drugs because it is the first attempt to use the government’s data to undermine its own arguments concerning drug use. Williamson advocates the Dutch method of decriminalising drugs and his book’s argument is hard to fault.

Recently Williamson set off on a “Change The Drug Laws” tour, taking with him Irvine Welsh, the convicted dope smuggler Howard Marks (whose autobiography Mr Nice has been a huge bestseller), MP Paul Flynn and Dr John Marks. The foursome asked to meet with the newly appointed “drug czar” Keith Hellawell, whose job in the new Labour government is to suggest new ways of tackling the drug issue. It was the most direct connection so far attempted between representatives from the chemical generation and those with the power to revise Britain’s drug laws.

Despite the rising tide of evidence that drug use is neither as medically harmful or socially destructive as it has been persistently represented, or the powerful voices of dissension beginning to speak up, the chances of Britain decriminalising drugs remain slim. Meanwhile, Britain’s dance culture shows no sign of waning, and the attempt to police it wastes millions of pounds of the tax-payers money each year, as well as criminalising those who are simply out for a good time. It’s already been proved that attempting to control drug use is futile – the question is now, what happens next?

The drug and alcohol treatment programs offered by rehab facilities apply different approaches to addiction treatment; from heroin to cocaine, ecstasy to LSD.

ZS: Your story ‘After the Vision’ was in my opinion the best in the Children of Albion Rovers anthology produced by Rebel Inc. It says it was taken from something called The Far Places. Was this a novel? It seems to have similarities to These Demented Lands.

AW: Yes, a section of a novel and parts of a linked series of short stories called, believe it or not, Trend Fault Team 2, about Highland kids who were into rap music. I might rework some of these stories sometime. These Demented Lands came from some other area of my storm tossed imagination.

ZS: These Demented Lands was a little bit different from your other novels, it was more surreal and included illustrations. Did you think of it as a chance to be more experimental with your text?

AW: Well, the illustrations you mention are already in Morvern Callar, the map Red Hannah draws for Lanna, for example, or the road sign. I enjoy breaking up the language that way and it sort of takes the reader out of the delusion of the text into another delusion!

ZS: Morvern Callar attracted lots of “Highland rave” type comments. Do you think there is a point these days in distinguishing between Scottish and other writing?

AW: It’s like Duke Ellington said about music . . . there is good writing and bad writing and those are the only two types.

ZS: And do you think that the chemical generation genre has run it’s course now? Were you pleased at being included in that whole thing?

AW: That was something invented by an editor called Sarah Champion [music journalist and editor of the 1997 anthology Disco Biscuits, which included a short story, ‘Bitter Salvage,’ by Alan Warner]. I mean I think you can write a good story about a nightclub but I don’t think you can base a whole literary movement on writing about nightclub life and ecstasy use. What bothered me about it is it was getting to be more about the writers than the writing, there was something egotistical and silly about it, “Look, we go to nightclubs but we are writers,” so fucking what. I’m interested in great books not the social life of writers. On a personal level I used to take ecstasy and go to Edinburgh Zoo. It was much better than a rave, cheaper admission, prettier girls, colourful parrots and there’s even a little licensed bar there. No bouncers either, just kangaroos.

ZS: You’re currently working on a novel called At a Fair Old Rate of Knots. How would you describe it and when do you think it might be published?

AW: (First answer) SORR M COMPUTR HAS REALL ROKE DOW
(Later) Travelogue from the point of view of a homeless guy who has no choice but to travel, and a critique of past Highland/literary/historical landmarks. It could end up with a shootout at Culloden battlefield! The title is now The Man Who Walks. I don’t have a clue when it’ll be published.

ZS: You’ve said that you really got into reading with authors like Alan Paton and Andre Gide. Who or what else inspired you to start writing, and who’s work really excites you (intellectually or otherwise) at the moment?

AW: I’M SERIOUS THE KEOARD IS FUCKED
Then: Camus (see below), Sartre (ditto), Michael Moorcock, Nietzsche, Herman Hesse, JG Ballard, Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams, the music of Holger Czucay

Now: Same writers and Mark Richard, Annie Proulx, Juan Carlos Onetti and the music of Holger Czucay.

ZS: Morvern Callar sometimes reminds me a little of Camus’ Mersault or even Sartre’s Roquentin, particularly in terms of her connections with other people. Were you self-consciously trying to explore existential concepts or styles of narration?

AW: IT IS EITEITAIL E
You’re spot on, Nausea, The Roads to Freedom trilogy and Camus’ work were awful important to me, especially Nausea and The Outsider. I think Morvern Callar is an existential novel . . . and one that taps into the absurd, that whole opening sequence. I think Morvern is outraged at the absurdity of death, the fact she has to jump over the body to get to the sink, the fact that she suddenly needs to take a crap, even though the man she loves is dead there in the midst of their (former) domestic bliss. The whole absurdity of having to get dressed and put on makeup though he’s dead. I think it metaphysically outrages her which is why she reports it so exhaustively and perhaps that’s why she walks past the phonebox. She’s rebelling against the absurdity of death, in that way she’s heroic I think.

ZS: There’s quite a few university courses now on creative writing as a discipline. Do you think that this is a good thing or does it run the risk of reversing some of the democratization of literature which has occurred recently (perhaps particularly in Scotland with Canongate and Rebel Inc), and putting literature back into an academic context?

AW: SORR I’M REAKIG UP HERE
Well I feel guilty about my suspicions because many good writers have come out of those workshops, especially in the U.S. where there seem to be millions of them. But I’m secretly appalled by the concept, I think writing is so intensely time consuming and private an activity there shouldn’t be much time for gurus and classes to attend in universities. I don’t think writing can be taught . . . you can be given pointers . . . be told to read certain books etc. but the only discoveries the writer makes are going to be solitary ones on the page. I see writing as an existential act, an axis between how you live your life and literature, the idea that you can institutionalise that scares me. It’s also a matter of time, it might take you ten years to find your style, the idea that a uni professor of creative writing can bring out the old stylistic KY jelly doesn’t convince me.

ZS: Do you think writers have a specific role in society to educate or agitate or produce art, or are they just doing a job like anyone else?

AW: FI COMPUTER
I think intelligence should be legalised, I think, as the poet Robin Robertson says, writers write for the void. I feel I make lonely cries and sometimes someone hears me, a writer can only follow the needs of the creatures of their imagination; if writers are going to write to formulas, be it the 19th century English novel or Soviet socialist realism (or Chinese) they will be doomed to artistic failure though they might flourish with royalties.

ZS: A. L. Kennedy recently brought out a book of poetry, and Irvine Welsh made that record. Have you considered forms other than prose with your writing, or been tempted to a complete change of medium?

AW: Well I mess around with oil and acrylic painting on large canvas. Abstract stuff. I’ve done a few on empty cigar tubes and I collect out of date credit cards so I’m going to paint on top of them. I’m doing one on top of Airfix models I’ve stuck to the canvas, I melted all the Airfix models into eerie shapes with a blow torch. I reckon they should sell for millions. I’m interested in other forms of writing. I’m working on an original screenplay and I publish the odd poem.

ZS: Do you think that in the future people will have stopped reading books, that attention spans will have decreased so much that everything has to be in visual and auditory fragments? Or that everything will be virtual and interactive?

AW: I HOPE COMPUTER HAVE ZERO ROLE I THE FUTURE SORRI THIS LAP TOP HAS REALLQUIT ALL THE KEOARD IS SEIZED TR TO SED THIS MADA MADA DO SED OUT A SEARCH PARTY
Nah, you don’t have to switch books on or log on, the tactile immediacy of a book in your greasy palm will never die. That doesn’t mean people will read good quality literature though. I don’t think the book is under serious threat, but literature is. People have been sounding the death of the book for too long, when cinema became huge in the 1950’s people predicted the end of the novel but movies actually lead to more novel reading. I think the “dumbing down” in culture is worrying . . . the appeal of channel 5 and all these tits and canned laugh game, the idea that “art” is just for pretentious wanks etc. etc. . . All that worries me. But virile art forms survive all kinds of upheavals. Even with a dying readership people would still write novels and some of them, great ones.

ZS: And are you working on the script for the film of Morvern Callar, and do you think it’ll translate well to a visual medium?

AW: I think Lynne Ramsay and Michael Caton Jones are the most exciting filmmakers to come out of Scotland since Bill Douglas so I’m over the moon they’re each adapting one of my novels. Lynne is still working on her screenplay of Morvern Callar in between her busyness with the international success of Ratcatcher which is surely one of the greatest films ever made in Scotland. Alan Sharp, the Scottish novelist and Hollywood screenwriter (Rob Roy, Night Moves, Ulzana’s Raid) is working on The Sopranos for Michael. Lynne and I will probably do a bit of work together on the final screenplay, dialect and that, but I really Lynne’s vision, she’s a real artist and I just want to go with her vision of the film not mine. She’s even said she’ll let me in on the editing so it should be exciting but with someone of Lynne’s integrity you’ve just got to let them make the movie they want.

Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electric tin openers. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. But whatever you do, don’t choose homosexuality.

Traditionally, this has been the general feeling in Scottish fiction over the years. More recently, we have become familiar with the dull, thudding masculinity of Kelman, Sharp, McIlvanney, Gunn. Even these days, as Chris Whyte has highlighted, ‘to be gay and to be Scottish, it would seem, are still mutually exclusive conditions.” (Whyte, Gendering The Nation, 1995). Now, at the end of the millennium, we have hopefully moved on from our national literary stereotype of the tortured, lonely (heterosexual, probably homophobic) anti-hero. (Think Cuffee, Laidlaw, Finn, Doyle and so forth). We have left behind the good old days when women stayed in the kitchen, entrapping men then withholding their love, and potential queers were suitably pathetic, warped and unhappy. Yet still we cannot readily disagree with Berthold Schoene that, “Scotland is still waiting for the emergence and subsequent ‘coming out’ of a generation of angry young men who, unafraid of their own feelings, would dare contest the misogynous and homophobic rules of the ‘Emotional Establishment’ inside” (Schoene, “Angry Young Masculinity”, in Whyte ed., 1995). Yes, there are (finally) many female authors at the very forefront of Scottish literature. Yes, Scottish poetry boasts some of the best lesbian and gay writers. So how long must we wait for this heralded new breed of angry young man? And might there also be an angry young woman?

Perhaps we need not wait that long. Perhaps the picture is not as bleak as an unreconstructed (or should that be undeconstructed?) kailyard in winter. At the end of the nineteenth century the “kailyard” (literally, cabbage patch) was all the rage amongst Scottish writers such as J.M. Barrie, F.R. Crockett and Ian MacLaren. Kailyard literature painted a sentimental, highly romanticised picture of rural and small town life in Scotland, full of the local colour of the Scots tongue. The only problem was, it bore little resemblance to the often harsh reality of the time. The realisation that all in the garden wasn’t quite so lovely didn’t come until 1901, and the publication of The House With The Green Shutters by G. Douglas.

This time round however, the fin de siècle has seen the emergence of another new genre, one that seems set to catapult us into the next millennium with rather more truth, not to mention style – the “satanic kailyard” (the name comes from a forthcoming essay by Christopher Harvie entitled “Kelman, the Canon, and the Satanic Kailyard”). This wonderfully appropriate term describes contemporary texts by Scottish authors such as Welsh, Warner, Hird, Legge and so on; that is to say the new generation of Scottish authors writing about Scottish urban working class youth in all its dubious, depraved, or just plain deranged, glory. The old cabbage patch has become the new housing scheme. The characters are more likely to work the benefit system than the land, and would generally rather settle down to heroin and Temazepam than neeps and tatties. However, has there been an equivalent revolution in sexuality? The satanic kailyard texts that will be considered here are Irvine Welsh’s The Acid House and Alan Warner’s The Sopranos, although reference will also be made to their debut novels, Trainspotting and Morvern Callar respectively. In the light of these texts then, the question which springs to mind is: in contemporary Scottish literature, why is it suddenly cool to be queer?

One of the primary aspects of satanic kailyard in general which is important in this context is its relation to popular culture, something which hasn’t always been de rigeur in Scottish fiction to date. It is perhaps due to the relative youth of the authors themselves that the details of their characters tend to be just right – they wear the right clothes, listen to the right music, go to the right clubs, take the right drugs, and so on – for people in their situations. Therefore it is reasonable to extrapolate that they will also have the right attitudes, and, “homosexuality has become acceptably familiar, if not yet unremarkable, for a growing generation.” (Andy Medhurst, “Wish You Were Queer?”, The Face, Jan 1999). With this in mind, let us proceed to examine the texts in question, and their portrayal of homosexuality, in depth.

Out of the collection of stories which make up The Acid House it is undoubtedly the novella, “A Smart Cunt” which is the most interesting as regards homosexuality. Brian, the central character, is straight in the sense of being heterosexual. However, there is another, far more important sense of the word in which he tends to be far from ‘straight” – that pertaining to drug use. In any narrative by Welsh, this is how we must understand the term. Brian’s friend Denise, on the other hand, is gay, as it seems is Penman. In many respects Denise is stereotypically camp; he “pouts with a saucy wink,” ‘squeals excitedly” and “minces smartly.” Needless to say, these activities are never performed by a heterosexual male character. Despite his apparent effeminacy though, Denise is easily capable of the aggression typical of most other characters in Welsh. When one of his “young queens” annoys him his reaction is instant, “BATTER YIR FUCKIN CUNT IN, SON!” He is in no way ineffectual.

Denise and Brian grew up together on the same housing scheme, a place to which Denise says he will never return. With the additional knowledge of narrator, Brian explains, “Denise never really fitted in back there. Too camp; too much of a superiority complex.” Obviously, Denise did not fit in primarily because he was gay, but it is interesting that the narrator doesn’t exactly say that. Instead, he gives us other options to add to our unspoken assumption of prejudice. This is borne out by the fact that even when Denise moved away from the scheme into the gay scene of central Edinburgh he did not find acceptance: “Gay punters that hang around Chapps, The Blue Moon and The Duck hate Denise. His stereotypical queen stuff embarrasses most homosexuals.” So in effect Denise is a double outsider – rejected both by scheme and scene alike. This is not as bleak as it may at first seem though; we learn that Denise “loves to be hated.” Although he actively chooses to be disliked he manages to retain a wide circle of loyal (and often heterosexual) friends.

Denise is not the only character with a penchant for camp; Brian himself engages in camp banter with his heterosexual friends, “Raymie sighs . . . then puts his tongue in my ear. I peck him on the cheek and pat his arse – You’re raw sex, Raymie, raw fuckin sex man, I tell him.” The emphasis on camp throughout “A Smart Cunt” may have a significant function in the text, apart from providing humour. Marty Roth quotes Andrew Britton as saying that the over-the-top performance of camp requires a ‘sense of perversity in relation to bourgeois norms” as well as resulting in ‘the frisson of transgression” (Roth, “Homosexual Expression and Homophobic Censorship: The Situation of the Text,” in Bergman ed., Camp Grounds, 1993). These two qualities tend to be possessed both by Welsh’s writing and by his characters; in this case the use of camp helps to create this sense of transgression.

The key point about “A Smart Cunt” in this context is found in the narrator’s attitude to his gay associates, Denise and Penman. They are his friends, their sexuality is not an issue for him, or indeed for others in the group such as Veitchy, Raymie and Spud. Brain has a sound knowledge of the gay scene and the gay lexicon. For example, he recognises when Denise is choosing to act like a stereotype, and he appreciates who is a queen and that the term does not apply to all homosexuals. This very aware attitude is thrown into relief by his diatribe against the crème de la crème of Scottish masculinity, the Hardman (actually a “big sensitive blouse”), ‘the Scottish Hardman chips a nail, so he head-butts some poor fucker.” In Brian’s schema it is the Hardman , not the homosexual, that is the “other”. The reverse tends to be true in his society; at one point he is beaten up merely for his association with Denise. This fits in with Jonathan Dollimore’s suggestion that, “homosexuality is so strangely integral to the selfsame heterosexual cultures which denounce it” (Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence, 1991). After all, where would the Hardman be without the gay man? In much of Scottish society, as in Scottish literature, the Hardman, or even just the heterosexual man, feels constantly obliged to strive against being mistaken for a poof.

It is a woman, Olly, who actually vocalises homophobic sentiments. To her, Denise is a “fuckin sick queer,” or a ‘sick poof.” Unlike Brian, she fears being damned by association, “I’m no fuckin fag hag.” Naturally, Brian springs to Denise’s defence, “he’s my friend . . . stop aw this homophobic shite: it’s a total drag.” This is rather ironic given Brian’s attitude to women, for example, ‘the main reason I was here was that it was full of fanny and I hadn’t had a shag in five months.”

One final positive characteristic of Brian, rare in Scottish literary males, is his ability to indulge in homosocial activity without the traditional angst. Schoene has commented on the phenomenon displayed by, but by no means limited to, Alan Sharp’s male characters:

The fear of being mistaken for a “queer” is so great that the manly courage of angry young men dwindles drastically when they come to realise the “dubious” intensity of their own emotional attachment to other men . . . natural enthusiasm for homosocial contacts . . . might be interpreted as the expression of a latent . . . homosexual desire.” (Schoene in Whyte ed., 1995)

Brian does not suffer from such insecurities about his own sexuality. On a night out with Penman, apparently a gay man, he explains, “I’d never felt so close to anyone, well, not another man, as I did to Penman that night. It was a lovers-without-the-shagging type scene.” Then, after meeting ex-lover Olly, “I went over and held Penman in my arms for a long time.” However, just as we become excited and let ourselves believe that Brian might be about to jump out of the closet we remember that he is, at this time, under the influence of Ecstasy. It seems that in a drug altered state intimate male bonding is more acceptable, and feelings can be acknowledged more readily.

Mark Renton in Trainspotting, perhaps Welsh’s most (in)famous creation, is not dissimilar in attitude to Brian, as is particularly apparent in the “London Crawling” section of the book. Chris Whyte says of this novel, “in a faithfulness to older paradigms which verges on the touching, Welsh’s only acknowledged gay character is a double outsider, an Italian immigrant encountered in London.” This is undeniable (with the exception of two lesbians who are introduced in “Feeling Free”), but again we can argue that it is Renton’s attitude towards Giovanni which is revealing. In fact, he is surprisingly benign – given that Giovanni first of all makes a pass at him in a dodgy cinema, and then abuses him as he sleeps (in a particularly unpleasant way!). Certainly, Renton is angry at first, but he soon ends up comforting and hugging the older man, feeling genuine sympathy for him, and in the end takes him to a party. Very charitable indeed. At the end of the night he muses, “ah might end up whappin it up the wee cunt’s choc-box yit.” Whyte quotes this as an especially damning comment, showing just how little Welsh has diverged from older paradigms. However, another reading might say that within the social and sexual register of Welsh it is a perfectly acceptable comment; considering the manner in which characters talk about women they fancy, or indeed love.

Besides, how often in Scottish literature do we find the “male lead” admitting to picking up a “gorgeous young queen” and taking him home for a bit of oral sex? Renton recalls this incident rather fondly – perhaps with amusement – but definitely without shame. Despite this event, Renton isn’t even bisexual, never mind gay. He did it because in London normal conventions don’t apply, “Ye can be freer here, no because it’s London, but because it isnae Leith.” It seems that being in London is a more potent, more liberating, altered state than being on Ecstasy is for Brian. The encounter with Giovanni also provokes Renton to consider his own sexuality again, “How the fuck dae ah ken ah’m no a homosexual if ah’ve nivir been wi another guy?.” Obviously for Renton gay sex must include anal sex to be “proper” – the “gorgeous young queen” doesn’t quite count. This is disappointing, after all, in the real world no such condition applies for gay men. Perhaps it is because anal sex is virtually essential in heterosexual relationships in Welsh’s writing that it is seen as absolutely essential in homosexual ones. Unsurprisingly, in the end Renton concludes that he is only really attracted to women, but comments, “It’s aw aboot aesthetics, fuck all tae dae with morality.” Mark Renton is no homophobe, and goes through a very normal and rational questioning of his own sexual preference. In comparison to someone like Begbie, for instance, he is positively enlightened.

Thus far we have only considered male homosexuality. What of lesbianism? It is true that we seem to be experiencing something of a backlash in the wake of the “lesbian chic” of the past couple of years. As Medhurst puts it in The Face, “dykes are yesterday’s news.” Not so for Alan Warner, especially in his latest novel, The Sopranos. The first clue we are given as to what the future holds for Fionnula (‘the Cooler”) comes when her friend Chell notes, ‘she’s been queerer and queerer lately, the crazy chick.” No author can seriously believe that readers these days will only take “queer” to mean strange or odd, so we instantly wonder just how queer Fionnula is going to become.

At first, she seems to have the same concerns as the other Sopranos – clothes, make up, drinking, and, of course, sailors. However, when she reaches the big city, Edinburgh, she experiences some of the slackening of normal constraints which Renton noticed in London. Initially, she considers her relationship with her best friend, Manda, ‘she just does all these really funny things that make me smile and smile, och, those sort of things make ya almost fall in love wi someone.” There are echoes of Brian in “A Smart Cunt” and his closeness to Penman, but in this case the examination of same sex friendship marks Fionnula’s first tentative step towards identifying her developing sexuality. Later on, she comments, “ah’ve always known, soon as I’m out of Our Lady’s am away fro the Port an down here in a jiffy.” One wonders if Fionnula, in her Wonderbra and high heels, would find any more acceptance in the gay scene than Denise.

The crucial moment for Fionnula comes when she discovers that Kay has had a lesbian experience; that she is not alone in her attraction to other women. However, Kay’s experience was not entirely homosexual, in that she ended up in menage à trois with a man and a woman, and indeed became pregnant as a result of it. On the one hand this is interesting as it acknowledges that sexuality isn’t necessarily clear cut; both Kay and Catriona could be described as bisexual. However, it also serves to blunt the impact of what Kay has done. The fact that a man was involved at all makes it less radical (perhaps for a predominantly heterosexual readership) than if she and Catriona had been alone together. Kay herself says immediately, “Catriona isn’t lesbian! Just that bit bi.” When Fionnula asks her how she feels about it she isn’t terribly enthusiastic: “I was really drunk that night and it just happened” and “It’s really good, Kay says in a way that sounded to Fionnula as if she might be talking about a bowl of soup or a drink.” Nevertheless this perhaps does not reflect her attitude so much as her narrative function at this stage – she is there to provide an “out” for Fionnula’s sexuality – and she does at least treat it as a very normal activity.

The implication which is made by both Fionnula and the narrator is that Kay can afford to experiment; she lives outside the Port, she is middle class, she is not a Soprano. Fionnula says, “you have a bit of space an got away wi that scot-free but someone would be sure an clipe on me.” She is painfully aware of the social reaction she is likely to get. However this also results in a pleasing irony; if anything Kay is a triple outsider, and her friendship with Fionnula is the only reason she is accepted by the sopranos in the first place.

Fionnula’s reaction to Kay’s news is not simply one of interest or relief that she is not alone. Already attracted to Kay, it provokes strong sexual excitement, “downwards Fionnula’s stomach dived and simultaneous a jellyfish sting, right in her fanny, and up, in an awful wonder came it’s warm spreadingness.” Warner tends to acknowledge and depict female desire very effectively, but this does make us ask why this is an awful wonder; because it is new to Fionnula or because it is homosexual in nature? In the end, Fionnula’s coming out is scarcely a coming out at all as such, “It’s just. Fionnula shook her head, Ah think ah like girls as much as boys. She paused a long time, Maybe more.” Fionnula at no point refers to herself as lesbian, even in a hypothetical sense. This could be an example of the trend towards “sex without labels” which Andy Medhurst envisages, or, “the arbitrary nature of sexual definition, the extent to which our sexualities are shaped by the larger social discourse” (Martin, “Roland Barthes: Toward An Ecriture Gaie”, in Bergman ed., 1993). Or, in Warner’s narrative, as in the Port, lesbianism might really be the Love that dare not speak its name.

The Port for Fionnula is similar to Leith for Renton, or the scheme for Denise, in that it is a place where the taboo on homosexuality remains firmly in place. As Andy Medhurst notes, “the ‘normalisation’ of homosexuality is a very recent development . . . there are still plenty of places where queers have to operate in virtually pre-War secrecy.” As we have seen, these places are often the very places that Warner and Welsh set their narratives, small towns and the housing schemes which surround big cities (effectively small towns in themselves). Given these settings it would be unrealistic to expect an “out and proud” attitude from all the characters. This does not, on the other hand, mean that Scottish fiction as a whole must behave as a small town where homosexuality is concerned.

However, in The Sopranos Fionnula and Kay ultimately present a challenge to everyone who is gathered for the finale in the Mantrap, or ‘the Night Fionnula McConnel Slow danced Wi Kay Clarke” – unfortunately to the rather twee accompaniment of There Are Worse Things I Could Do. At first they aren’t ‘star attraction” as “Kylah spun onto the floor doing a pretty good waltz, with her arms wrapped passionately round the sanny bin.” If that had been how things had stayed then a sense of perspective on the situation would have been retained. In the Mantrap, however, the act of two girls dancing together is a very big deal indeed. Although their friends are watching, the main audience is of men, who move nearer to get a better look. Indeed, in one sense Fionnula and Kay embody an exceptionally clichéd male fantasy – not only lesbian, but Catholic, and schoolgirls as well! Hence it is quite a relief that when they do actually have sex Warner does not dwell too much upon the scene, and emphasises the fact that Fionnula feels as if she’s falling in love.

This marks quite a departure from Morvern Callar, where the strong homoerotic subtext between Morvern and her best friend Lanna is played out in a series of rather exploitative scenes. In some cases a male character is present to assume the role of voyeur, at other times it is left up to the reader to do so. For example, Lanna tends to help Morvern to get changed, always “biting her lip,” apparently an indication of scarcely concealed lust. When Morvern puts on her supermarket uniform, Lanna, ‘smoothed the nylon onto me with her palms.” Lanna also fastens Morvern’s suspenders before a night out, then later on unrolls Morvern’s stockings to reveal her glittery knee to the men in the pub. “Everyone was watching,” and some men whistle at her exposed thigh. When they finally end up at a party, they decide, somewhat bizarrely, to have a shower together, “as per usual . . . to save time.” This (naturally) allows plenty of opportunity for soaping each other and so on. It is hardly a surprise when at the end of the night a game of strip poker turns into a menage à quatre. At first Morvern just watches, but soon she joins in as well, “I let them do anything to me and tried to make each as satisfied as I could.” Although Morvern Callar is unusual and progressive (for Scottish fiction) in that it has a first person female narrator yet is written by a man, Warner goes even further with The Sopranos; moving from subtext to actually encompassing homosexuality within the plot.

Although any action between Morvern and Lanna is heavily veiled, Fionnula and Kay first kiss in full view of everyone in the Mantrap, in “clear and vivid” light. Kylah gives Fionnula a chance to pretend nothing has happened, “when yur wasted enough , you’ll snog, that’s the way it goes, I’ve near snogged ma brother out of boredom when ah’ve been pissed enough,” the implication being that a same sex kiss is along the same lines as an incestuous kiss. “If Fionnula and Kay had been willin to leave it at that, they might of had the whole thing forgot, an put down to another drunken night,” but it isn’t just another drunken night, it is a huge stepping stone on Fionnula’s path to self-discovery. She decides, “If You’re gonna burn your bridges burn them,” and goes home with Kay.

Fionnula’s best friend Manda is the only one who reacts badly to the situation, “Fionnula, ya can’t go around doin that, people’ll think you were lezzie,” also trying to deal with the information about Catriona, “ma oh-so-fantastic sister is a pervy lesbian.” The next day, Orla suggests that Manda is, “just jealous” and even says to Fionnula, “telling you, she would go for it with you now.” Then the other sopranos turn up and Fionnula’s news is soon lost amid all the other things that have happened; Orla losing her virginity and getting ill again, Manda and the bouncer, the reprieve on being expelled. Even Manda now behaves as though nothing untoward has happened; her initial homophobia appears to have been conquered.

So, in these examples of “satanic kailyard” we have seen a gay man with a female name and a violent streak, a male central character with lots of gay friends, another who has had a homosexual experience, a female main character coming out and several women with blurred sexual identities. These are the new angry young men and women. Not bad for Scottish fiction. None of these are anywhere near being homosexual texts, after all, “A text is not homosexual because there are homosexual characters, even less because two boys get married at the end: such texts are only the transposition of traditional heterosexual narration” (Martin, in Bergman ed., 1993). Warner and Welsh may be cult reading, but a Scottish Dennis Cooper has not yet appeared on the literary scene. These texts do however go some way towards normalising homosexuality, by acknowledging that it has a place in mainstream texts as well as in exclusively gay literature.

Earlier on we asked why this normalisation of homosexuality was becoming apparent in these texts, and concluded that it was a necessary reflection of changed attitudes within the society which they depict (which of course includes the readers who buy these books). This is certainly true. There is however another important function of this phenomenon – subversion. In Scottish fiction it is apparent that, as Schoene says, “heterosexual masculinity is still commonly regarded as ‘the normative gender’ and heterosexual men are still widely believed to be the only adequate representatives of our species . . . straight masculinity is a given that has hitherto remained undefined.” Warner blatantly rejects this ridiculous, yet tenacious, notion by having a female narrator in Morvern Callar, and an almost exclusively female cast of characters, including a lesbian central character, in The Sopranos. Welsh subverts it more subtly. At first glance, Renton and Brian might seem to follow the norm of heterosexual masculinity. On closer inspection, as we have seen, this is not the case. By giving Brian gay friends, or by allowing Renton a homosexual encounter, Welsh is in fact undermining this traditional notion of undefined straight masculinity. Both authors have therefore challenged the heterosexual male stereotype so beloved of Scottish writing.

This is part of the reason why these texts are so important. They do not nod towards any politicised notion of homosexuality because they have their roots in a society where people recognise their unequivocal right to be gay, or to not bother defining their sexuality at all. Many Scottish authors remain rooted in a time or place where homosexuality is somehow unacceptable. That time is over, that place has almost disappeared, but for the most part Scottish fiction has not caught up. This is 1999, and, according to Andy Medhurst, “the days of homosexuality-as-issue are drawing to a close,” and about time too. In Scottish poetry, this is old news, as poets such as Jackie Kay and David Kinloch have proved. Is the prose world waiting for an Edwin Morgan of its own to hammer home the point that it’s okay to be gay, even in Scotland?

It’s time for Scottish fiction to get a grip. Come out of the closet. Choose the future.

When Trainspotting rapidly grew from underground publishing success story to zeitgeist-surfing, underworld-soundtracked cultural event, Irvine Welsh was described as a spokesman for a generation and the most exciting writer in Scotland. While the use of language and setting was something of a novelty first time round, Filth is Welsh’s fifth novel and revisits the same ground as everything else he’s ever written. We have deviant sex from The Acid House, Tarantinoesque musings on rock records from Trainspotting, half-arsed attempts at psychology and social comment from Marabou Stork Nightmares and, of course, lots of swearing. As with most recent Welsh product, it’s also a shambolic and incoherent mess.

Filth tells the story of Bruce Robertson, an Edinburgh policeman whose life resembles Harvey Keitel’s in Bad Lieutenant. Racist, misogynist, homophobic and psychotic, Robertson devours hard-core pornography whilst mentally and physically abusing himself and everybody around him. Despite his appalling personal hygiene supplemented by a genital rash and an attack of tapeworms (more of this later), he nonetheless manages to have sex with almost every female he meets, in between setting up colleagues for queer-bashing or driving others to the brink of suicide.

Robertson isn’t really a bad person, though. As his tapeworm explains in the latter chapters of the book – yes, the narrator is quite literally talking out of his arse – Robertson has had a tough time. He came into the world as the result of a violent rape, his adoptive stepfather made him eat coal, and the first love of his life died. The section describing the death of his first girlfriend is the only funny part of the book as Welsh goes massively over the top, piling on the pathos as he recounts how the poor crippled girl is struck by lightning in a scene that could have come straight out of an Airplane movie. Unfortunately this bit is supposed to be serious.

The book runs to about 400 pages and fully 300 of them repeat the same endless catalogue of sex, violence and hatred with little in the way of variation. Some of the scenes are evidently supposed to be funny, such as the set-piece where Robertson attempts to make a video of a prostitute being penetrated by a dog or when he sleeps with a colleague’s wife after framing her husband for making obscene phone calls. Conspicuous by their absence are the wit and invention that characterised Welsh’s earlier novels, like the foul-mouthed baby in The Acid House or Sick Boy and Spud in Trainspotting. Weighed down by the expectations of his audience, Welsh has produced a book that fails on every single level: a comedy that isn’t funny, a police procedural that can’t be bothered with the details, a tale of redemption without any trace of warmth or sympathy for any of the characters and a closing plot twist that’s visible from the first chapter.

There’s a tradition in reviewing where you make sure you don’t give away the ending of a novel for fear it will prevent people from reading it. Hopefully, then, the news that Robertson committed the brutal murder he’s supposed to be investigating throughout the book and then kills himself at the end should prevent people from wasting their hard-earned cash on this pathetic attempt at a thriller. Maybe then Welsh will stop recycling past novels and will attempt to write something that’s actually worth reading. To describe Welsh as the greatest writer in Scotland is a huge insult to talented writers such as Jeff Torrington, William McIlvanney, James Kelman, Iain Banks and Janice Galloway who produce novels which combine well-drawn characters with empathy and social conscience.

Although the title works on several levels – Filth as slang for policemen, or as a description of the world in which Bruce Robertson lives – the publisher was too restrained. A more fitting title for this shambolic, scatalogical mess of a book would have been Shite.

Brecht once remarked that he’d like to see the kind of people who attended football matches at his plays. Scotland has not had a particularly distinguished record in the field of football, but in recent years, blessed with writers who can play in any position, it has begun to enjoy success on another stage. The country has gone from Celtic fringe to cultish frontier. Where it hitherto proved fertile ground for English and European theatre, Scotland is now growing its own, and exporting it too. One of the advantages of being a colonized culture is that you can break more easily with established forms and norms.

In Scotland the traditional divide between two kinds of theatre, high brow and low-brow, was crossed by 7:84 (Scotland) and a new theatre of commitment. This shift was reflected in the founding of Mayfest in the early 1980s, a Glasgow arts festival backed by the trade unions whose mission was to ‘celebrate not only May Day but also Scottish working class theatre and popular political theatre from other countries’. A key player in successive Mayfests and in touring community venues was Wildcat Theatre Company. Today, with Mayfest on ice and Wildcat’s claws pared by cuts in funding, polemical theatre has reached an impasse. On one level this can be read alongside the failure of traditional institutions such as political parties and trade unions to effect change. With subsidised theatre on its uppers and old-style political theatre on a downer, the time was ripe for the kind of high jinks among low lives offered by Irvine Welsh and others.

Between the formal experimentation of the Citizens’ and the radical commitment of 7:84, something was lost. If the working classes were absent from one then they were straightened out and made presentable in the other. Neither avant-garde theatre nor agitprop were sufficient in themselves to do justice to those excluded from official culture, an exclusion that was literally obscene. Established theatres were slow to respond to the dynamism of popular culture, and to the explosion in fiction and poetry that was transforming the Scottish literary map. With Glasgow experiencing a crisis of identity as the workers city was repackaged as City of Culture, the East Coast stirred. If Glasgow’s tea was out, then Edinburgh’s was in the making. The 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 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, and a unique opportunity to engage with an audience in real time. With film, reality is screened, the inevitable happy ending undercutting any edge. While bodies like the British Board of Film Censors maintain standards of hygiene, theatre is completely uncensored, blissfully free from the editorialising and moralising of the powers that ban. Theatre has survived repeated attempts to stifle it and has in the process emerged as a resilient and versatile space where nothing is unspeakable, where you can in principle say anything, a platform for free speech, a place of absolute freedom and a place of no mercy. The only cultural form to have been banned wholesale, prosecuted and hounded by censors for four hundred years, theatre has built up immunity to attack from the guardians of decency. Thirty years after the scrapping of the office of the Lord Chamberlain, the stage remains resistant to most strains of censorship, even the most virulent.

Scotland has not always been at the forefront, but it is adapting to change. The move from page to stage is all the rage for angry young writers north of the border. The accent is on voice. Duncan McLean insists on ‘a commitment to the voice as the basis of literary art, rather than some supposed canonical “Officially approved” language’. The soul of Scottish theatre no longer frets in the shadow of the English language. In the interval between the curtains closing on didactic political theatre and a slow drawing down of blinds for drawing-room drama a new hybrid form entered stage left – absurd, enraged and intense, a theatre of cruelty and hate that is at once tender and torn, cool and comical, with a pen dipped in rebel ink, stylish but possessed of a certain substance.

The social realist tradition was not merely on the side of the working class, but stood in their way, portraying them, representing them, speaking for them. The social surrealism or hyper realism of Welsh’s writing aches with authenticity, touching sore points with a persistent probing that leaves you trembling. When working with Boilerhouse on Headstate Welsh spoke of ram-raiding the set. He meant this literally, no doubt, but it is in the area of metaphor and speech that Welsh excels, rather than in any accepted notion of stagecraft. Welsh is not tongue-tied by authority or ham-strung by convention or classical training. If his plays, angry and experimental, are like movies, then they are less drive-in than drive-by, marked by a casual violence and a language that fairly crackles with cruelty. He has taken the pulse of Scottish theatre, and given it a much-needed smack in the face. Much has been said of Welsh’s articulation of drug culture, but under the influence of film – Mamet and Tarantino spring to mind – Welsh is pushing theatre, a Class A drug if ever there was one, and giving audiences a welcome shot in the arm.

Not that pride or patriotism are called for. Welsh’s references to ‘shitey Scotland’ capture a growing scepticism about modern manifestations of nationalism. Looking at life through schemie windows, with twenty storey vision, Welsh sees the world with a colder eye than the old Scottish school of radicals, and he manages to be dispassionate, even as his characters burn with a fierce indignation. Prolific and provocative, Irvine Welsh has left his imprint on the postmodern Scottish psyche. He has been called ‘the poet laureate of the chemical generation’, but Welsh’s appeal is much wider than the popular youth culture he so eloquently represents.

As the margins fold back to infringe on the metropolis, it is appropriate that a new play by Irvine Welsh is opening in Leeds. Mercurial and mobile, Scottish theatre cannot be reduced to a single company or venue, nor should it be categorised as a movement. Movements, like parties and trade unions, may have had their day, not to mention their hole. Instead, we should imagine something more akin to a carnival – vibrant, vivid and vigorous, the stuff of life and the stuff of theatre. Why have a slice when you can have the whole cake, and a language sandwich to boot? It’s high time you had your high tea. You’ll have had your theatre.

Dr Willy Maley is a lecturer at the University of Glasgow’s Department of English Literature. This essay first appeared in the programme notes to the original production of You’ll Have Had Your Hole.

[Note: this interview is about the original stage production of Trainspotting in 1996. Spike also has another interview with Harry Gibson on the 10th anniversary stage production of Trainspotting in 2006.]

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, 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 original as possible. And you’ve got the freedom to do that because theatre is the exception to the rule. It hasn’t suffered much censorship since the 1950s. The theatre is very much a middle class medium and therefore it’s considered quite all right to have arseshagging and all that sort of thing going on because it won’t be a bad influence on the proles because they won’t see it. It’s the telly you’ve got to control because it’ll get through to the working class and probably pervert the children. So ordinary people have to put up with tons of censorship all the time on the telly, whereas when they go to the theatre they get to hear it like it really is.”

This freedom of portrayal has been tested to further extremes with Gibson’s adaptation of Welsh’s second novel, Marabou Stork Nightmares. Nightmares makes Trainspotting look like Ivor The Engine, with the story centring around rapist and football hooligan, Roy Strang. Gibson’s commitment to faithfully representing the text doesn’t shy away from the novel’s most appalling moments. “If you have to cry or turn away from particular scenes, then you do. But the scenes stay in. It’s necessary that they are there. It’s great to be doing this kind of stuff because it’s in people’s bloodstreams, it’s not classic, it’s not old, it’s not trying to teach you something, it’s not trying to tell you to live better lives, it’s just there like the smell of your own sweat. I really wish theatre could keep on being like that and not keep slipping back into being a snobby, musty medium.”

Despite Nightmares’ success, the chances of it following Trainspotting around the country are distinctly limited. “It’s filthy expensive because it’s an epic panto from hell. I might do a small version of it in which a small group of naked people savage each other in a cage. I’m completely serious about that. I’m very into sensationalism, I’m a shocking sensationalist.”

Even after being immersed within Irvine Welsh’s violent realities for the last three years, Gibson’s next major project sounds like a major challenge: “I’m going to do something rather delightful next. I have the rights to do a stage version of AA Milne’s When We Were Very Young. It’ll be set in 1924 which will be very lovely and no one will say ‘cunt’ at all.”

With the phenomenal success of Trainspotting (in all its various literary, filmic and dramatic guises), Irvine Welsh has moved from semi-literary obscurity to the centre of contemporary English writing. Trainspotting was one of those books that provoked people who hated reading to devour its three-hundred plus pages. This never happened with Martin Amis. But the real reason for Trainspotting’s popularity was lost amongst the inevitable, tedious furore about whether or not it glamorised drug-taking. The title of Welsh’s new book seems to play on that uproar – it’s so obvious that it’s got to mean something else. All of Welsh’s work, from Trainspotting to the new collection of stories in Ecstasy, is primarily concerned with the decay of England, the Orwellian political double-talk and the demand for conformity. It is concerned with the reasons for why people are compelled to take drugs, not the vapid posturing that occasionally goes with it.

“Glen felt that you had to party, you had to party harder than ever. It was the only way. It was your duty to show that you were still alive. Political sloganeering and posturing meant nothing; you had to celebrate the joy of life in the face of all those grey forces and dead spirits who controlled everything, who fucked with your head and livelihood anyway, if you weren’t one of them. You had to let them know that in spite of their best efforts to make you like them, to make you dead, you were still alive. Glen knew that this wasn’t the complete answer, because it would all still be there when you stopped, but it was the best show in town right now.”

In his foreword to the play script for Trainspotting, Welsh asserts that he writes because “other realities exist, have to be shown to exist.” As the above quote indicates, Ecstasy tries to fulfil this idea. Fortune’s Always Hiding, especially, moves into new territory for Welsh, concerning a Thalidomide victim and her lover who seek revenge on the disastrous drug’s marketing director. Constructed as a mystery story, the reader watches the various characters lives entwine towards a horrifying but inexorable conclusion. Welsh will probably incur politically correct wrath for his central protagonist Samantha feeling incomplete through her deformity, rather than being a well-adjusted young woman just like everybody else. Yet the anger that she feels does not show itself as self-loathing but as violence towards the corporate mentality, illustrating that the tragedy of Thalidomide only happened through greed. Not an original premise, perhaps, but these ideas need to be stated over and over again to counter the incessant governmental bullshit that tries to excuse such greed.

By contrast, the collection’s first story feels like a rehash of all of Welsh’s previous work. Lorraine Goes To Livingston is a bizarre tale about a TV personality necrophiliac with a strong Somerset accent and an obese Romance writer who suffers a stroke. Welsh seems to be engaged in self-parody here. The Somerset accent is rendered in his by-now trademark phonetic spelling, and there are interludes written in the bodice-ripping style of Rebecca the romance writer, which was a device Welsh previously used in Marabou Stork Nightmares. On top of that, the two nurses who have to look after Rebecca can only think about going to the upcoming Goldie gig. Welsh peppers the story with similar contemporary club references, but unlike his other work they seem to be mere namedropping rather than driving the narrative. The result is amusing but ultimately ephemeral.

The Undefeated is Ecstasy’s final and longest story, continuing Welsh’s love affair with Iggy Pop and returning to Trainspotting’s style of using first person monologue. This is what Welsh does best – the stream-of-consciousness style is dazzling at times, especially when the main character Lloyd describes being on acid or during sex. (Funny, that). Interspersed with the rebirth of Heather, a housewife who ditches her Dire Straits suburban husband and finds life amongst the rave scene, Welsh smoothly demonstrates his belief in the liberating power of dance culture. Most interestingly, he avoids the easy route of claiming utopia. If drugs can liberate you, then they can as easily ruin you. Lloyd and Heather only fully get together once she realises that Lloyd’s packed in drugs for a while. He’s realised something. This gives the story a peculiarly conservative twist – that the natural high of love is better than a chemical one. But in that context, Welsh makes a trite assertion radical within the E’d up environs of the club scene.

In all, Ecstasy shows Welsh to be restless, eager to take on new challenges in writing. Even when he stumbles, he still produces effortlessly readable prose, which uniquely captures the mood of contemporary England. Forget Will Hutton’s The State We’re In -get Ecstasy instead.

The definitive collection of Irvine Welsh links is at www.irvinewelsh.com

You’ll Have Had Your Theatre
Dr Willy Maley on the theatrical assault of Irvine Welsh’s new stage play You’ll Have Had Your Hole

Queerspotting
Zoë Strachan drags Welsh’s and Alan Warner’s writing from out of the closet…

Filth
SPIKE’s review of Welsh’s latest, distinctly off-form, novel

Trainspotting – The Play
SPIKE’s interview with Harry Gibson, director of Trainspotting and Marabou Stork Nightmares’ acclaimed theatre production