Trainspotting hits the stage

"Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a starter home. Choose dental insurance, leisure wear and matching luggage. Choose your future. But why would anyone want to do a thing like that?"

Thirty-year-old Ruaraidh Murray, who stars in a play based on Irvine Welsh's controversial novel, has most certainly chosen life.

His parents initially worried about his choice of career.

"My mother started crying when I told her I wanted to be an actor because she thought I was going to be broke," he laughs.

"But I kept going and I'm keeping at it. This play, for me, is making progress. I'm loving it, it's a wonderful opportunity."

He is no stranger to acting. Aged ten, his first television appearance involved being thrown off Glasgow's Gibson Street Bridge in the Channel 4 political thriller Brond.

True, he was killed off in the first scene, but he became hooked on acting as his future career, even when he spent a year studying an art foundation course in Leeds at 18.

While there, he became involved in community theatre and subsequently decided not to follow in the footsteps of his mother, a painter, and his father, a sculptor.

After spending two years at the Oxford School of Drama, he moved back to Scotland, got himself an agent and, nearly two months ago, bagged himself the part of Tommy in Mark Goucher's production of the play written by Harry Gibson in 1995.

Hailing from Stockbridge, in Edinburgh, he is the perfect candidate to act in the play, adapted by Gibson in 1995, which follows a group of working-class friends who become addicted to heroin to escape what they see as the mind-numbing and spirit-crushing' life.

The book was turned into a hit film, directed by Danny Boyle, the following year and starred Ewan McGregor and Robert Carlyle.

"I loved the film and saw it when it first came out," Murray says.

"I'm born and bred in Edinburgh and it was the first film about where I was from. Junkies are not something to be proud of, but the actors were amazing and it was a benchmark for British film."

But there are differences between the film and the book, which is written in the native Edinburgh dialect.

"The play is a lot more like the book it's a lot darker, more gritty." he explains. "But at the same time it's got that dark humour."

Growing up in Edinburgh, where the book is set, he witnessed the effects of what he describes as the huge influx of heroin' into the city. Thankfully, the situation has calmed down a lot since then.

"You see it when you grow up," he explains.

"I went to a normal Scottish school. I had mates whose older brothers had big drug problems, but you knew where the line was so you didn't cross into that area."

The play seeks to be as lifelike as possible and Murray, alongside fellow cast members Brian Alexander (Franco Begbie), Laura Harvey (Alison) and Peter Milne (Mark Renton), has to pretend to inject himself with heroin with a real needle on stage.

But he says his character, an amalgamation of the book's Spud and Tommy himself, is fundamentally a good person.

"He's a good guy, level-headed, he's not into the drugs his friends are into.

"He's strong, but his girlfriend leaves him, he starts taking gear and then his world falls apart.

"His journey becomes a very sad one at the end. I liked playing his character the diversity of it."

While he won't admit to having experimented with drugs himself, he did have to answer the question at his audition.

Perhaps the hardest part of playing Tommy is that Murray, who has lived in London for the past eight years, has to take his clothes off at the end of the production.

As a seasoned actor, he acknowledges it is part of the job.

But he won't be looking forward to the performance back home which will be watched by his mum, aunts and many people he grew up with. "But you have to bite the bullet," he adds.

u Tickets to see Trainspotting at the artsdepot, Nether Street, North Finchley, which runs between January 19 and 21, cost between £12 and £18. For tickets and times, call the box office on 020 8369 5454.