‘Why tho?’ is the main question that’s been floating around since the announcement came that Trainspotting was being turned into a musical. After all, Irvine Welsh’s gritty depiction of drug addiction and deprivation in 1990s Edinburgh doesn’t exactly lend itself to jazz hands. Sadly, having sat through all two-and-a-half-hours of what amounts to a pile-up of bizarre artistic choices, I’m here to tell you that scepticism is entirely founded. Landing exactly 30 years after Danny Boyle’s stunning film version, this is not so much a homage to Renton, Spud, Sick Boy and the gang (though characters are styled to look like their on-screen counterparts), but a soiling of their memory.
The cast are not to blame, mind; they do their best with the material they’ve been handed. But tonally it’s a complete mess – and it shares about as much DNA with Boyle’s film as The Rocky Horror Show does with Frankenstein or Dracula. It’s a shame, really, that no one decided to change tack and go full parody, instead.
What’s wild is that Walsh hasn’t just given this slip-up his blessing, he’s one of its key creatives, writing the book and co-writing some of its songs with Stephen McGuinness.
Not so much a homage to Renton and the gang as a soiling of their memory
Under the direction of Caroline Jay Ranger, who previously scored something of a normie hit with her West End’s musical adaptation of Only Fools and Horses, the whole thing is mechanical and cringeworthy. Every time someone shoots up on stage, you worry they’ll break into song – and they do! What’s more, criminally on-the-nose choreography (Ranger is also movement director) too frequently involves an ensemble reeling back with arms flailing, or jiggling their feet, or jerking around to stress that they’re junkies.
There is literally zero subtext here: I lost track of the number of times characters turned to the audience to remind us there were no jobs but heroin was everywhere. We also get the film’s famous ‘choose’ speech twice, just in case we missed it. Though to be fair, Lewis Kidd’s Renton delivers it with convincing animation. Frankie O’Connor is also worth a shout out as the growling and alarmingly volatile Franco Begbie – he might be the best thing in it.
But Colin Richmond’s stage design struggles to convey the squalor being described. A projected backdrop of tenement buildings roots the piece in Edinburgh, but a double exposure effect that shows the buildings splattered with paint just looks naff – as do the wheelable set pieces. Douglas O’Connell’s video design is also misused: we don’t need to see the gang on the road to Blackpool, but an opportunity is missed in not showing time passing as they lie about trance-like after taking a hit.
It has about as much guts and vigour and channeling of sordid lived experiences as the average primary school play. Queasy scenes from the film, like Spud revealing his pooey bedsheets, are played as if it’s a pantomime, and moments that should smack you in the face with their awfulness, like Alison’s baby dying or Tommy being crippled by AIDS, just don’t.
The original songs are bleurgh and span a real mishmash of genres: dance, jazz and – jarringly – American country and western. So when mightily good songs from the film’s soundtrack album crop up – like Iggy Pop’s ‘Lust For Life’ and Lou Reed’s ‘Perfect Day’ – it’s almost blasphemous. Everyone is susceptible to smack, someone observes, before the whole cast breaks into a shudder-worthy rendition of ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’.
This misfiring adaptation is the perfect case in point that not every story should be turned into a musical. In fact, very few should be. It’s worth mentioning there is already a very good play of Trainspotting – one that actually pre-dates the film (!) and regularly goes on tour. If you want to see this story live, choose that, not this.
Theatre Royal Haymarket, until Sep 5. Buy tickets here.
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