An 11-year-old girl collapses at school after smoking heroin. As the commentators and campaigners debate the shocking revelation that 60 or so primary school children are reported to have used heroin in Glasgow alone, the 10th anniversary stage production of Trainspotting arrives in Edinburgh.

The timing should work in the play’s favour. Irvine Welsh’s novel, written in the 1990s about the heroin epidemic that devastated the capital’s housing estates in the mid-1980s, spawned both the original stage play and the decade-defining film. The novel is a magnificent exposé of the black humour and sticky brown chaos of junkie life. The film is a caper, slick and pacy, with clearer-cut characters and a narrative force absent in the book. Harry Gibson’s stage adaptation, first seen at Glasgow’s Citizen’s theatre in 1995, lies somewhere between the two, including some of Welsh’s darker material but squeezing the yucky stuff for every possible laugh.

So if heroin, like the poor, is still with us, what new light does the 10-year-old Trainspotting shed on the subject? About as much as a 60-watt bulb. The initial shock of seeing a West Granton living room on stage, and hearing the C-word scattered around like budgie seed, has gone. Gibson’s script contains, he claims, 147 c***s. I am struggling to remember a single one. The wit and poetry of Welsh’s dialogue, so fresh when the book was first translated onto the stage, has not aged well. And the landscape of drugs has changed, making this Trainspotting little more than a blurry period piece.

Take Tommy, the one who almost gets away with it. Ruaraidh Murray introduces him as a rubbery buffoon, every second word a “likesay”, every gesture a grimace or a pratfall. His descent into heroin addiction, and infection with HIV, should be at the dramatic heart of the production.

But a lack of sympathy for his irritating characterisation — which it’s impossible not to compare unfavourably to Kevin McKidd’s perfectly judged film performance — is compounded by the advances in medical technology. Thanks to triple drug therapy, Aids is no longer a death sentence, so the scene where a naked Tommy, modesty preserved by a tray of drug paraphernalia, wheedles some money out of Renton before scurrying away, presumably to die, loses much of its impact.

The audience, many of whom were still learning to read in the 1980s, reacts with embarrassed silence.

Renton has an easier job and Peter Milne is a more natural comedian. He is also the best-fed junkie I’ve ever seen — shirtless scenes reveal a chest that verges on the buxom — but what he lacks in Muirhouse pallor he replaces with a physical confidence that makes for some of the play’s strongest scenes. Bouncing along in a taxi with Brian Alexander’s Begbie and a set piece at a funfair stand out as highlights.

Milne is less comfortable on the dark side. The death of baby Dawn should be a heart-stabbing dramatic high. Instead it feels like a long, hard slog. When the audience knows what is going to happen, the director has to work extra hard. Instead we long for Laura Harvey’s Alison to stop wailing and Renton to get on with cooking up or, if at all possible, get back onto the safer subjects of shite and shagging.

When that is all it tries to do, this Trainspotting is diverting enough. Harvey’s monologue about tampon soup and Milne’s opening description of the unfortunate incident of the excrement-filled duvet at the breakfast table still do a turn. But there is no new insight, no twist, nothing to make this revival more than a reheated collection.’

Times Recommends

• UK regional accents thrive against the odds
• ‘Scarecrow’ wind farms put rare birds to flight
• What an anti-climax: G-spot is a myth