Theatre: We're not in Oz anymore

Treating urban myth as reality, Irvine Welsh's Babylon Heights tells of four Munchkin extras' nightmarish treatment on the set of The Wizard of Oz. By James Redmond

Babylon Heights. Written by Irvine Welsh and Dean Cavanagh. Mill Theatre, Dundrum. www.milltheatre.com. Until 26 August

The poster of a Munchkin clutching an oversized bottle of whiskey while peering up Dorothy's skirt summarises the irreverent attitude of Babylon Heights. If the land of Oz lies over the rainbow, the spotlight here is on its far-from-pretty underbelly of lurid sexual violence, personal betrayal and drug dependency. Describing the Wizard of Oz as an "indispensable part of our cultural heritage in the West", Welsh's production with the Attic Studio tells the tale of four Munchkin extras humiliated and exploited by a greedy film studio.

Welsh has spent much of his literary energy piercing the bubbles of comfortable modern fables. Just as Renton's "choose life" speech in Trainspotting ruptured the materialist values of Thatcher's Britain, so Welsh's latest stage project, written with Dean Cavanagh, rolls a hand grenade under the door of American popular culture.

Judy Garland's allusion to tales of drunken sex parties and drug abuse at the Culver Hotel, where the nearly 200 Munchkin actors were segregated from the main cast, created one of Hollywood's most persistent urban myths. These rumours are exhumed afresh by this collaborating duo, who, taking Oz myths – like the one that says a Munchkin corpse can be seen hanging from a plastic tree in one scene of the film – as reality, construct a manic, hallucinatory world at the heart of an enduringly innocent Hollywood fantasy.

By using regular-sized actors against an enlarged scenario, Welsh strove to avoid pandering to "a sniggering herd mentality" by provoking the sensationalist media surrounding this controversial topic. The play has raised the goat of some disability organisations, but its portrayal of the experiences of four actors of diverse backgrounds thrown together after being hired by a vaudeville retainer is far from an elucidation of victimhood for simple comedy, as some critics have lampooned. Granted, the first half is full of predictable gags that veer towards belittling its subjects, but the real humour is the hilariously caustic commentary on the shooting of Oz. The comedic highlight is a self-referential monologue on the use of the word "cunt" as a precision piece of language to be carefully rationed – as fans will know, it's a word punctuating much of Welsh's previous work.

The actors' performances throughout are frantically goofball, a little overbearing and at times nearly collapse into pantomime. Despite this lack of dramaturgical depth, the play is a brave but somewhat disjointed fall into the nightmarish gap between Hollywood glamour and reality. Routinely patronised for their small stature by a booming off-stage voice representing the abusive and abrasive studio, underpaid and fed false promises of the custom-made homes they will get after the shoot, these four characters have no possibility of clicking their heels and going home. As one of them exclaims, they are "stuck here like that little bitch in Oz".