The King’s Head Theatre in association with In Your Face Theatre and Tobacco Factory Theatres has brought a firecracker of a production of Irving Welsh’s Trainspotting to the very alternative space below Temple Meads station’s old engine shed, now known as Klub Loco. Artistic Director Adam Spreadbury-Maher says he is delighted to be working with the original cast again, having enjoyed a successful run in Bristol earlier this year and triumphing at the Edinburgh Fringe this summer.
In this brick-lined vault, this closely-knit troupe of young Scottish actors mirrored film director Danny Boyle’s original intension to make Trainspotting something ‘with intense energy that ends in purgatory or worse’.
To say that there was audience participation would be to understate the proceedings. During the highly charged mayhem throughout, we were splattered with ‘shit’, (oh yes, the toilet scene lives up to its promise), found ourselves eye-level to exposed genitals, and in my own case, had my glasses tossed to the floor by a maddened Begbie and was later ordered to sniff ‘smack’ by Renton. There is nowhere to run! Be prepared.
Wearing glow-stick wristbands, the audience filed through to the performance area where the cast was already in place, dancing their socks off to pulsing techno-beat disco music from the late 80’s. Green lasers flickered through a light fog of smoke as we were seated in the round in a ‘T’-shaped space.
Then, bang! We were off. In this, IYF’s second performance of the night, we were taken hell-bent on a Wild Mouse-like ride of self-destruction. Our anti-hero Renton was played startlingly by the excellent Gavin Ross, a quivering, bald and sometimes naked Gollum-like being seized by cravings and indulgencies. Immediately he took us to depths of depravity that both shocked and in a weirdly horrific way, deeply amused us. Ross possessed his role, never leaving us in doubt about his total conviction to understanding a man at the threshold of oblivion. His monologue about smack being an honest drug, and the eyeglass it gave to better observe life’s bullshit was Shakespearean in intensity and insightfulness, while his personal battle with body chemistry provided epic physical theatre.
Ross was supported by a wonderful cast. Chris Dennis filled the room with his macho and psychotic posturings as the violent Begbie, while Greg Esplin and Michael Lockerbie gave the characters of Tommy and Sickboy some profound vulnerability. In a hilarious job interview scene with Renton, Esplin as the barely articulate Tommy did a wonderful job of puncturing middle class delusions of inclusiveness and equal opportunity. Calum Douglas Barbour slithered nicely as the friendless pusher (Mother Superior), Erin Marshall convinced as the downtrodden and bereft Alison and Rachel Anderson was as in-your-face about anal sex as the boys were about shooting up.
This production was too short to explore more fully, as it does in the film, Renton’s salvation and life post-smack, but it remained true to the tenacity and intensity of Welsh’s original exploration into the darkest crevices of human existence.
The dialogue, mostly shouted, in strong Scottish dialect, was not always easy for us softy Southerners. But with body language as raw as this we were never in doubt as to meaning or direction. A high-octane multiple human train wreck hitting the buffers, this a tour-de-force performance worth catching. ★★★★★ Simon Bishop 2nd September 2016
