His new play has been called 'disrespectful' by the Restricted Growth Association, but Irvine Welsh is a writer who enjoys controversy, he tells Arminta Wallace
It's a bit like a scene from one of his own books: two blokes thrown out of posh hotel. If it was a scene from an Irvine Welsh book, of course, they'd have been drunk and disorderly. They'd have given the staff of the Four Seasons Hotel an earful and perhaps even been sick on the carpet. As it is, these two mild-mannered, immaculately dressed blokes are just trying to get a publicity picture sorted. Such is Dublin in 2006. Sorry, sir, comes the firm reply, no photographs allowed.
When Welsh returns from his unscheduled excursion on to the streets of Ballsbridge he is smiling ruefully. Ten years after the runaway success of Trainspotting, he is at ease with celebrity. He can also, it seems, acquit himself pretty well in the boxing ring. Which is appropriate, because his work divides people into the red-corner folk - who write glowing reviews and/or maintain adulatory internet sites - and those in the blue corner, who object to his treatment of drugs, pornography, violence and the rest.
Welsh is supposed to be plugging his new novel, The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs, but due to a flurry of controversy - see blue corner, above - his new play's the thing everybody in Dublin wants to talk about. Babylon Heights, co-written with his screenwriting partner, Dean Cavanagh, is due to open at Dundrum's Mill Theatre on Monday. In the meantime, the Restricted Growth Association has called its portrayal of people of small stature "disrespectful and irresponsible" and has threatened to mount a protest outside the theatre.
The play is set in 1938, during the shooting of The Wizard of Oz, when a large number of dwarf actors, hired to play the Munchkins, were billeted in one hotel, separately from the rest of the cast and crew.There were rumours of wild Munchkin sex parties and drunkenness. Another rumour insisted that one of the dwarf actors hanged himself from a tree on the film set, and that his body shows up as a silhouette in the Tin Man scene on early prints of the film.
Official sources dismiss the latter as an urban myth: the shape visible on the tree, they say, is a bird. Babylon Heights, however, explores the notion that if a dwarf actor did die from suicide on the set of The Wizard of Oz, some inner conflict must have prompted him to take his life.
"The young actors who were playing the Munchkins - away from home for the first time, many of them - were, because of their disability, effectively under house arrest," Welsh says. "They couldn't get in a car and drive away, so they were stuck on the set all the time. There were 100 of them going stir-crazy in this California hotel - a sort of Tennessee Williams or David Mamet-esque idea."
DOES WELSH HAVE sympathy with the view that since dwarfism is rarely represented in the mainstream media, negative representations of dwarf actors are, to put it mildly, unhelpful?
"I kind of agree to an extent," he says, "in that our characters are not representative, or may not represent dwarfism particularly well. But the point I want to make is that this is a very different thing from, say, Mini Me in Austin Powers or the 'baby' star of the film, Little Man, which is doing well in the States now." Those characters are, he says, tired stereotypes. "What we do is see the characters as rounded human beings responding to an extreme situation. We're not really interested that much in the fact that they're people of restricted stature. They're more of a metaphor for the small people in America during the Depression, who were being pushed underfoot. They're a more extreme version of that, a more extreme version of humanity if you like. I think that if these groups come and see the play, they'll have a very different view."
Unless, that is, they take exception to the fact that the play itself eschews the use of dwarf actors, choosing instead to employ "normal"-sized actors on an outsized set.
"We made the decision not to use people of restricted height for the actors because we didn't want the idea of the Victorian freak show, where the dwarves are performing as if it was a circus and the so-called 'normal' people were watching them," Welsh says. "The whole thing is set up so that the audience will empathise with these four characters. We want people in the audience to see themselves in the position where they'd find doors hard to close, drawers hard to open, beds hard to climb up on."
Much of the empathy - or the lack of it - has, he claims, to do with sight-lines.
"Look at Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, pixies, elves, cherubs. Children instinctively have empathy with people of restricted growth. It has a great deal to do with eye-level contact, I'm sure it has. We wanted to get the audience back to that, by recreating the scale in an intense black-box space."
Before finding that space, he and Graham Cantwell, the director, looked at various theatres in Dublin but none of them - ironically enough - was the right size.
"They were either too big, which meant the sense of intimacy and menace was lost, or so small we couldn't get the big furniture in," he says. The Mill Theatre, he maintains, is "a perfect state-of-the-art theatre in a great spot".
So enthusiastic is Welsh about the benefits of an evening of theatre-going in Dundrum - complete with a spot of shopping and maybe a meal in Harvey Nicks - that he sounds like an ad for the Town Centre. But then he's enthusiastic about Dublin in general - he has been living in Rathmines for two years with his American wife, who's studying history at UCD.
HE IS ALSO, he confesses, a food enthusiast - hence the title of his new novel, The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs. The plot concerns two young environmental health officers in Edinburgh, whose mutual antipathy leads to a weird - well, it is Welsh - physical situation. Like the characters, the book reels from merciless drunken binges to something like bourgeois respectability, a journey reflected in the use of less phonetically transcribed "vernacular" than regular readers of Welsh are used to.
"The characters in this book are working class," he says. "But they're more into the professions, and they're used to expressing themselves in that kind of way in that kind of company. So the characters dictated how much dialogue and how much first-person narrative to use. It seemed to me, looking at these guys, that they were part of the system rather than not being part of it like the Trainspotting and Maribou Stork Nightmares crowd. So it's more a kind of Blairite book than a Thatcherite book."
Mention of Blair reminds me of another Welsh rarebit I've come across on the internet. Is it true he has deserted his famously lefty leanings to become a supporter of British Conservative Party leader David Cameron? He leans back in his armchair and snorts with laughter.
"The Daily Telegraph started that," he says. "I'll tell you what happened. I did an interview with the Telegraph in which I basically said that I've always disliked and despised Tony Blair. I said that David Cameron is cut from the very same cloth, and is just as smarmy as Tony Blair, but will probably get in at the next election because he doesn't have the same baggage."
In the publicity line alerting Telegraph readers to the interview in the following day's paper, this was compressed into "Welsh respect for Cameron". From there, things escalated.
"Then it became that I was a closet Tory," says Welsh. "And then it became that I'm an actual Tory. I heard it myself on Newsnight. And apart from being called a paedophile or a Hearts supporter, it's the worst thing anybody could say about me."
But doesn't it get to him, this Chinese-whispers - or should that be Welsh-whispers - carry-on? He shrugs. He used to write a column for the Telegraph, and has friends there.
"It's one of them taking the piss, basically," he says. "Trying to wind me up. And the Scottish press will happily pick up anything like that and run with it."
He is, he declares, looking forward to the next controversy. "I'll be touring this book for the next month in the UK and US - and I'll say something which will create an explosive scandal," he says. "Just wait and see. I mean, we've had the political one; we've had the dwarves one; so it will probably be something about race or sex or drugs. You can't let it bother you. It's part and parcel of the game we're in."
And better, I offer, than being ignored. "Is it, though?" he says, with an evil grin. "Ridicule? I don't know about that . . ."
• Babylon Heights opens at the Mill Theatre in Dundrum on Mon. The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs is published by Jonathan Cape, £10