Twelve years after it was first produced, Harry Gibson's adaptation of Irvine Welsh's novel about Edinburgh main-liners going nowhere shows no sign of running out of steam. Out on a massive national tour, Gibson's own production still has plenty of (low)life coursing through its veins, even if huge venues such as Hackney Empire deny the conspiratorial intimacy between actors and audience that this show needs.
(Otherwise it descends into the kind of theatre tourism that allows us to pay to gawp at the funny little junkies from the safety of row G.) In this barn of a theatre it is not only Tommy's injection of heroin into his penis that passes almost unnoticed, but also the cold, clear-eyed philosophy of a piece that, for all its wild laughter, is so unbearably painful that it makes you want to just say no.
Gibson's adaptation always had a real theatrical swagger and confidence, as well as an ability to shock that pre-dated a great deal of the other in-yer-face theatre of the mid-1990s. More than a decade on, its cunning theatrical stylisation means that this play still seems brash, bold and energetic even if these tales from the frontline of the chemical generation are now both wearyingly familiar and slightly dated. Welsh was writing about the late-1980s when the first waves of cheap smack poured into British cities devastating lives and communities.
But unlike the movie, which played up the humour and was high on its own anarchic audacity, the stage version doesn't shirk the more introspective episodes in the book, or the sense that there is no escape from the hellish prison that the characters have constructed for themselves. Gibson's cast of tender toughies make no concessions for the English ear, and although the production needs to expend as much energy on the gaps inbetween as it does on the comic set-pieces, this is an evening that mostly goes full-steam ahead.
· At Birmingham Rep, May 1-6. Box office: 0121-236 4455. Then touring.
