From novel to the stage

Trainspotting (3 stars)

Mysterious Skin (3 stars)

An Adult Evening of Shel Silverstein (2 stars)

This year at the Fringe, a number of cult writers find their work transposed to the stage in a variety of manners, some more successfully than others. 

 

Irvine Welsh describes the theatre as "bourgeois shite", so it's perhaps apt that Harry Gibson's adaption of Trainspotting contains as much shite as Tunbridge Wells produces a day. Literal shite. The production opens with Renton heroically rising from a mattress naked and smeared with faeces before accidentally spraying his hosts with the soiled sheets. Later he probes through his own excrement in a toilet basin in search of a fix.

 

The novel’s monologue-driven narrative makes for a slick stage adaptation, and it's as immediate and gruesome as it deserves to be. It also helps that junkies tend to stay in one place, so their set changes are few. The cast is kept to a minimum, but this just gives Renton more room to manoeuvre. He is magnificent as the heart of the play, at once despicable and endearing, the nihilist with an irrepressible enthusiasm for the unpleasant. 

Plot isn't particularly important to Welsh's work, so the considerable liberties the production takes work well for the most part. Only the ending falls flat, seeming too neat and self-consciously smug to suit the chaotic nature of the rest of the play. Bleak and harrowing, what saves Trainspotting is its black comedy, stylish flourishes, and knowing that you’re sat surrounded by Welsh’s fans on his home turf.

 

Similarly to Trainspotting, Mysterious Skin plots its path from book to stage via a hit film. Adapted from the cult novel by Scott Heim, it is a complex psychological drama that finds unique ways of portraying the long-term affects of paedophilia.

Set in the mid-80s, the play follows two apparently separate storylines of two very different teenage boys. While a gawky Peter Parker-esque Brian dabbles in UFO theories in small town Kansas, a cocksure Neil hustles in AIDS-ridden New York City. What links them is an event that occurred when they were both eight, which one has recalled as alien abduction and the other as first love.

 

The play contains some masterful performances, most notably Myfanwy Waring as the comically forward UFO enthusiast who reads Brian’s interest in the topic as interest in her. But the plot leaves little between its exposition and the final revelation, and the scenes that remain feel rushed. The stage itself feels too small for the play's ambitious themes, and is at times claustrophobic, yet this only makes it more harrowing as the truth of the boys' past emerges. Mysterious Skin is worth seeing for the story alone if not for its pacing and production. 

 

Like Scott Heim, Shel Silverston is better known in his native America than this side of the pond. A much-loved children's author over there, he also wrote a cult series of one-act plays, here performed by Patapsco High School's enthusiastic students in An Adult Evening of Shel Silverstein. 

 

They are an oddly surreal collection of pieces, mid-way between comedy sketches and Beckettesque pastiches. Russian Roulette, murder, drug abuse and promiscuity all feature, so it’s perhaps unfortunate that the plays were performed at nine o’clock in the morning. This does not discourage the teenage cast who are impressively animated.  But for all the actors’ effort, many of the pieces are unimaginatively staged and mostly forgettable, not quite funny enough to be a sketch, not quite poignant enough to have any resonance. This might just be one for fans of Shel Silverstein.