Review: Eating Your Froot Loops? Then Skip This Review

NEW YORK — Eating breakfast? Nibbling on anything at all? You might want to give this a skip until you’re done. In the immersive British import “Trainspotting Live,” at Roy Arias Stages, the gross-out factor is gleefully high. Wouldn’t want you to gag.

All right, then. Shall we talk about the toilet? If you’re a fan of the 1996 Danny Boyle film “Trainspotting” — starring Ewan McGregor as the young Scottish heroin addict Mark Renton, and based on the novel by Irvine Welsh — you knew there would be a toilet.

It’s probably the movie’s most famous scene: when Renton, desperate to retrieve a couple of opium suppositories he’s inadvertently deposited in the foulest of foul public toilets, dives into the bowl after them.

This stage version, from the King’s Head Theater in London and the Edinburgh-based In Your Face Theater, plunks the toilet right in the middle of the audience, its white porcelain encrusted with brown dribbles, a dried turd perched on its edge. At the performance I saw, the people hunkered closest to it seemed happy with their proximity, even when Renton (Andrew Barrett), feeling around in there, splashed them with liquid.

“Trainspotting Live,” then, is for a particular kind of audience, the sort that’s game for flying toilet juice or, say, a bare bottom inches from their eyeballs as Renton, in another unfortunate excretory incident, takes his time toweling waste off his body. And it is funny.

Personally, I wasn’t wild about it when Begbie (Tom Chandler), the one true lowlife in Renton’s band of ne’er-do-wells, called me “princess,” angled his crotch at my face and uttered a gross sexual command. But maybe that’s just me and every woman I know.

The thing is, though, I am a fan of the movie, and of last year’s sequel, “T2 Trainspotting.” The stage adaptation, written by Harry Gibson, predates them both, so a comparison might seem unfair.

Yet I missed the elements that make Boyle’s original film such an achievement: the nuanced humanity amid the ugly, brutal mayhem; the hallucinatory sense of becoming detached from reality and helplessly submerged in some other psychic landscape.

The directors here, Adam Spreadbury-Maher and Greg Esplin, go doggedly in pursuit of fun, and the result is way off-kilter. The actors are likable, if a little too fresh-faced to be convincing as heroin addicts. Their accents are admirably understandable, which isn’t exactly a strength of the film, and the humor works. But we don’t get much sense of the characters as people, and the women are so thinly drawn that they barely register. Neither does any sense of seamy tragedy.

As close as we are to the action, we’re cut off from the emotion of it. Someone screams that her baby is dead, and we think: “Wait, what baby? And which character are you again, ma’am?” Even the sad story of Renton’s lovely friend Tommy (Esplin) isn’t given the oxygen it needs to touch us.

Without that dimension, the show is drained of all impact as it darkens toward the end. By then, it’s like a diorama of addiction playing out before us, while we’re just tourists, placidly looking on.——

‘Trainspotting’

Roy Arias Stages, Manhattan; trainspottingnyc.com.

Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes.