The site-specific specialists at Edinburgh’s Grid Iron company could have gone for a number of locations to suit an adaptation of Andrew O’Hagan’s semi-autobiographical novel. Perhaps a squalid mid-80s flat to match the formative years of Jimmy Collins, the book’s narrator, and Tully Dawson, his lifelong best friend. Or a caravan park to reflect their Ayrshire holiday escape. More poignantly, they could have found a clinic to echo the novel’s slow journey to Dignitas, where the grownup Tully chooses to end his life after a terminal cancer diagnosis.
Instead, adapter and director Ben Harrison has homed in on the book’s central motif: the teenage trip in 1986 to Manchester’s G-Mex for the Festival of the Tenth Summer followed by a night in the Haçienda. That brings us to a warehouse in Leith, to evoke the flavour of that Thatcher-era moment when heavy industry transitioned to the leisure economy.
