Shooting up is hard to do

THE CRITICS THEATRE

LAST WEEK Tom Stoppard, this week another drama dominated by language - in the case of Trainspotting, though, that's language as in "mind your language". Even in Edinburgh Scottish - which to English ears, at any rate, has a mildly softening effect (it somehow isn't quite as alarming to listen to anecdotes about waking up covered in "shite and pish") - Irvine Welsh's dystopic portrait of contemporary Edinburgh is linguistically shocking. Nor is this just pointless taboo- breaking, swearing because it's big and clever. The kinds of things that Welsh's cast of junkies, drunks and other varieties of wasters get up to can't be adequately described in any other sort of language: spraying a friend's parents with the results of a night of multiple incontinence; squeezing a tampon into somebody's tomato soup; shooting up with a dead baby in the next room; dipping your arms up to the elbow into a blocked- up toilet to fish out opium suppositories you've lost during an attack of diarrhoea. You'll gather we're not doing the traditional Christmas family shows this week.

You'll also gather that there's plenty to make you flinch - and also to make you laugh heartily, if you have the stomach for it - in Harry Gibson's adaptation, at the Ambassadors for the next six weeks. But all the action here is contained within language - these are all, with the exception of the dead-baby incident, recycled as anecdotes (and even with the dead baby, you only know that there's one there because one of the actors has told you there is). The problem that Gibson has faced, both as adaptor and as director, is to find some sort of on-stage equivalent for the violence of the language. It's hard to imagine what this equivalent might be - even when two of the actors pull out their penises and start urinating on stage, it seems like pretty small beer compared with some of the stuff we've been hearing about: you ask yourself, "Is that the best they can do?" But while you sympathise with Gibson's difficulties, you can't pretend that this loosely structured collection of stories really amounts to a play.

In the circumstances, it's not surprising that the four actors find it hard to pitch their performances. Peter Ireland and Gavin Marshall have good moments - Ireland in particular bringing home the empty seriousness and monotonous self-obsession of the committed addict - but too much of the time they seem to be groping for something to do with their hands. By contrast, Michelle Gomez is all too consciously acting the stories, rather than telling them straight. The only really assured performance comes from Paul Ireland, though even he's open to the criticism of being, if anything, too charming. He has a cheerful, perky quality that makes him seem like a grown-up version of Oor Wullie; so that when he's describing how, at his brother's funeral, he ends up in the toilet having sex "doggy-style" with the brother's heavily pregnant girlfriend, you catch yourself thinking what a cheeky wee scallywag he is. Somehow, you don't feel this is what the author had in mind.

Lack of stagecraft is not something you'd complain about in the case of According to Hoyle: William Gaminara's poker-playing comedy contains some elegantly contrived moments of hilarity and horror - at one point, Jonathan Coy walks into a room and joins in the tail-end of a conversation about whether Peter-Hugo Daly has been sleeping with his wife; and there's a full 10 seconds of nervous speculation before you're certain he hasn't cottoned on.

There are a lot of other pluses to this play: some excellent ensemble acting, some sensitively written moments of self-revelation; so that it isn't, let's be clear about that, a simple clone of Patrick Marber's poker comedy Dealer's Choice. But while Gaminara writes smoothly and competently, he seems too much of the time to have no faith in his audience's ability to suss what's going on. Jokes get explained and repeated, killing off the laughs; the fairly transparent examination of masculine role-playing is hammered home by some thumpingly obvious stereotyping. We have macho multiple-divorce Clive, hiding his tenderer feelings under a show of hard- drinking bluster and public urination; shy, sensitive Micky, an eternal virgin and a fussy housekeeper; easy-going Eddie, who can't see women as anything other than sex objects; happily married but secretly transvestite Kevin; and all-round well-adjusted new man Chris.

It's obvious too early on where all these relationships are heading, so that the climactic revelations lack punch; and Gaminara's analysis of sexual politics doesn't get much beyond the level of a Cosmo feature - in particular, you feel that he's been told about Kevin's feelings about cross-dressing by somebody else, rather than thinking the issues through for himself. All the same, the characters are engaging (with the exception of the tiresomely normal Chris), and it's rarely boring. With some of the heavier underlining rubbed out, there's at least the makings of a good play here.

Masculine role-playing is also at the heart of Peter Nichols's Privates on Parade, revived by Paul Clayton at Greenwich. As in Poppy, his panto- based account of the Opium Wars, Nichols uses a drag act as an essential component of his understanding of British imperialism; politically, you feel his case is a little oblique, but there's no disputing the usefulness of the device in purely theatrical terms. Unfortunately, in this production the part of Acting Captain Terri Dennis, leading light of the Song and Dance Unit, South-East Asia, during the "emergency" of the late 1940s, is played by Tony Slattery. Whatever his qualities as a comic - and he does milk some broad laughs out of his impersonations of Vera Lynn and Marlene Dietrich - Slattery is never going to win any awards for his ability to lose himself in a character. The effect is to throw the play off-kilter, so that you lose sight much of the time of the equation Nichols is making between sexual, racial and political oppression.

There are compensations: Damien Matthews has precisely the right understated, blokeish naivety for Private Flowers, the schoolboy who becomes a man - and correspondingly less sympathetic - in the course of the campaign; and Nicholas Le Prevost gives a spotless performance as the shortsighted, morally rearming Major Flack, who believes that imperialism is excused by the fact that we're bringing Christ to the heathen. By and large, though, it's amazing how Clayton has managed to make such a clever, witty comedy into something so mortifyingly dull.

`Trainspotting': Ambassadors, WC2 (0171 836 6111), to 6 Jan. `According to Hoyle': Hampstead, NW3 (0171 722 9301), to 13 Jan. `Privates on Parade', Greenwich, SE10 (0181 858 7755), to 3 Feb.