Playspotting

>> After taking Irvine Welsh’s Ecstasy to the stage, Keith Wyatt finds himself writing a screenplay with the famous scribe

by MATTHEW HAYS

Keith Wyatt’s Irvine Welsh experience began with an aborted show. For the ’98 Edmonton Fringe Theatre Festival, the young thespian, then a student in the University of Alberta’s acting program, was attempting to stage a production of Trainspotting.
Alas, he and his cohorts would find that the Toronto-based Canadian Stage co. had snagged the rights to the Trainspotting play for an entire year. Wyatt responded with that old show-must-go-on spirit: he picked up every story Welsh had ever written and began to look for alternatives. He came across Ecstasy, and the story struck multiple chords. “I was very involved with the rave scene at the time,” reports Wyatt. “I could really identify with it.”
Thus the novel was adapted to the stage by Wyatt, who premiered it at the Edmonton Fringe to sold out crowds and wildly enthusiastic critics. He and his fellow castmates (the show calls for six other actors and a DJ) took it to the road, travelling across Canada and to the U.K., where Welsh himself caught a performance at the Edinburgh Fringe. There, Wyatt was honoured after Welsh declared that Ecstasy was “the best theatrical adaptation of my work to date.”
And that meeting has led to a new collaboration: Wyatt and Welsh are working on a screenplay adaptation of Ecstasy, to be completed this March. (Ecstasy, in play form, is already in print as part of the anthology 4play, by Vintage Press.) As well, Wyatt is working on his first novel, Confessions of a Courtesy Clerk (full of autobiographical tales from his 10 years’ service as a grocery-bag stuffer in Edmonton), and on a new play, Anime, “about society’s growing dependency on technology.” :