How Begbie, Sick Boy et al would snigger
The Edinburgh Festival was the object of some memorable, acidic mirth in Trainspotting.
One vignette in Irvine Welsh’s name-making debut distilled the derision of its junkie protagonists at the flyer-thrusting, arty invasion of the Royal Mile. Renton gets handed a leaflet for The Caucasian
Chalk Circle by Nottingham University Theatre Group: “Doubtless a collection of zit-encrusted, squeaky-voiced w------ playing oot a miserable pretension to the arts before graduating to work in the power stations which give the local children leukaemia or investment consultancies which shut doon factories…”
A viscerally immersive stage version of that 1993 generation-definer – endorsed by Welsh – is here this year, in its own tunnel at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre. A “must-see”, we’ve raved. But old-man Welsh is also back in his home town with two new works, both of which take aim at the subject of cultural production – who owns what, who owns who – and both of which prove dismaying misfires. Duds of the fringe.
The better of the two, undoubtedly, or at least the most promising, is
Performers. Co-written with Dean Cavanagh, his regular screenwriting partner, it attempts to give us a periodfaithful flavour of the outlandish auditioning process of underworld heavies that fed into Performance, the steamy cult 1970 thriller by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg. Two London crims (Perry Benson’s dim, bespectacled Alf and George Russo’s tense, repressed Bert) are waiting for (Edinburgh-born) Cammell in his poster-decorated office but he has been held up meeting (the film’s star) Mick Jagger. So they pass the time nattering to his secretary, Alf ’s dollybird, bee-hived niece, with whom Bert has been carrying on.
She brings them cups of “Rosy” (Welsh has swallowed the dictionary of cockney rhyming slang), while they stare in gormless, disconcerted wonder about the place. The scene, ploddingly directed by actor Nick Moran (of bygone Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels fame) is briefly enlivened by the arrival of a hippyish young film-production dogsbody – bamboozling the duo with talk of Borges and Francis Bacon, and causing division in the criminal ranks when he suggests they strip off so he can ascertain whether they’re comfortable with avant-garde nudity.
It’s fine as far as it goes, which isn’t nearly far enough. Before you can say “strike a light and no mistake”, it’s all over. What a con. Yet it’s a bleeding masterpiece beside Creatives – a dire collaboration with Don De Grazia, the American novelist – billed as a “pop-opera” and set in a Chicago evening songwriting class where the students croon and critique each other’s would-be hits (penned, to his little credit, by Laurence Mark Wythe).
These shallow-seeming hopefuls are having a contest, judged by former pupil turned smooth, smug pop star Sean O’neill (Tyler Fayose). “It’s about modern America, contemporary America, Trump’s America,” Welsh has said. It’s actually about 75 minutes long, and you may need heroin to get through it. Every exchange sounds stilted, and the piece peaks in a faintly risible episode of mad-eyed, gun-toting revenge for a perceived act of plagiarism. My how Begbie, Sick Boy, Spud et al would snigger.