The site-specific specialists at Edinburgh’s Grid Iron company could have gone for a number of locations to suit an adaptation of Andrew O’Hagan’s semi-autobiographical novel. Perhaps a squalid mid-80s flat to match the formative years of Jimmy Collins, the book’s narrator, and Tully Dawson, his lifelong best friend. Or a caravan park to reflect their Ayrshire holiday escape. More poignantly, they could have found a clinic to echo the novel’s slow journey to Dignitas, where the grownup Tully chooses to end his life after a terminal cancer diagnosis.Instead, adapter and director Ben Harrison has homed in on the book’s central motif: the teenage trip in 1986 to Manchester’s G-Mex for the Festival of the Tenth Summer followed by a night in the Haçienda. That brings us to a warehouse in Leith, to evoke the flavour of that Thatcher-era moment when heavy industry transitioned to the leisure economy.Exuberant … Kieran Devine as Younger Jimmy and Jude Bain as Younger Tully in Mayflies. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/the GuardianIt is a decent fit, if you can forgive the echoey acoustics, not least in the way the hedonistic past never stops informing the sobering present. At either end of the large space, the audience sitting on four sides, Lewis den Hertog projects a non-stop catalogue of images – fleeting footage of Morrissey and Marr, the vivid Peter Saville colours championed by Factory Records – that feel like an exhibition in themselves. The soundtrack by David Paul Jones bubbles with snatches of Joy Division, the Smiths and the Fall.Even so, it is an odd novel to put on the stage. All the narrative energy comes in the first third when Jimmy, Tully and their exuberant pals fulfil their romantic dream of travelling south to Manchester. The bulk of it is a reflection on that formative trip from the perspective of adulthood. When, in the play, the grownup Tully (an excellent Graham Mackay-Bruce) declares his illness, he clings on to his maverick spirit and insists there will be “no mawkishness”.But how could there be anything but that as he and his friends – Matthew Pidgeon as Jimmy, Carmen Pieraccini as Jimmy’s wife Iona and Lucianne McEvoy as Tully’s wife Anna – endure the slow process of his departure? Fidelity to the book is the adaptation’s strength and weakness.