Irvine Welsh’s exciting, vigorous tale of hard drugs, hard friendships and hard choices made a successful opening at Oxford’s Old Fire Station. If not as provocative as when it first appeared on stage in the early 1990s, it still has all the laughs and agonies, and a superb production effort makes it a gripping couple of hours.

Everyone who hasn’t been living in a box for the last few years has heard the story: three junkies in Edinburgh experience the extreme ups and downs of heroin, the ecstatic highs of shooting up and the evil lows of withdrawals and overdoses. They try to get to grips with an unsympathetic world, but seem doomed to failure and a return to the drugs. Their children die, their families and the law try to discipline them, their girlfriends dump them, and worst of all, they are Scottish: ‘the scum of the earth, the most wretched, servile, miserable, pathetic trash’.

The success of Welsh’s story lies in its non-judgemental attitude to drugs. There is no good vs. evil: It is all a question of choice. The characters usually choose to take heroin because it makes them happy for a short while, though it brings dire consequences. On the other hand, they could ‘choose life’ - the slogan of the story - choose the ordinariness of ‘nine to five, good at golf … family Christmas, indexed pension, tax exemption, clearing the gutters, getting by, looking ahead, to the day you die’.

The first night performances from the cast of four were lively and confident, though the most forceful conviction is required for a play that is supposed to be strongly visceral and physical. Sam Brown was excellent in the leading role of Mark Renton, the most relaxed of the cast, exerting a presence in an understated manner. The comic timing of Ross Burley as Spud was also spot on, bringing big laughs from the audience. There was room for more menace in his other role as psycho Begbie, though he still conveyed the necessary sense of unease and latent violence whenever he entered the scene.
The production worked very well, with what appeared to be a minimal set superbly augmented by pivotal props such as dead baby Dawn and the toilet from hell descending from the roof on ropes. The lighting was also effective, creating the contrasting atmospheres of dingy squat and rapturous nightclub. And after the success of the soundtrack of the film, it is fitting that a lot of effort had gone into choosing the soundtrack for the OFT production (it is even on sale!).

Trainspotting is well worth getting along to see, and with every performance this production will gain power.

Ben O’Loughlin, 20.05.03