Trainspotting the Musical | Theatre Royal Haymarket | ★☆☆☆☆

I was 13 when Danny Boyle’s adaptation of Trainspotting was released, and I had never seen anything like it. It became one of the defining texts of my teenage years. Two decades later, I enjoyed the concentrated rush of nostalgia delivered by the 2017 sequel. I have read the books, too: not only the original, a stone-cold classic, but also the various follow-ups and spin-offs, even when the quality became increasingly patchy. The pub where Begbie threw a pint glass over the balcony, The Crosslands in Glasgow, used to be my local. I have even interviewed Irvine Welsh over a steak dinner.

All of which is to say that Trainspotting the Musical ought to feel tailor-made for me, particularly because it was created by Welsh himself. If I dislike it as intensely as I do — and I dislike it a great deal — it is hard to know what everyone else is supposed to make of it.

Trainspotting the Musical is in thrall to Danny Boyle

The warning signs appear almost immediately. If the “Choose turning off your mobile phone, choose being in the moment” preamble is included, the famous Choose Life speech is raced through three times in the first five minutes. That sets the tone for a production that is wholly beholden to Danny Boyle’s 1996 film. The characters dress in the same way, adopt the same mannerisms and recreate the same scenes, sometimes in painstaking detail and at other times so perfunctorily that the result feels like a box-ticking exercise.

That dependence matters because Trainspotting has already lived several lives: first as Welsh’s fiction, then as a film whose images, performances and soundtrack became embedded in 1990s British pop culture. A stage version has to decide whether it is reimagining that material or simply inviting the audience to recognise it. This production too often chooses recognition.

Consider the famous “Spud shits the bed” scene. Here, it is stripped of context. Spud is suddenly naked, clutching an armful of soiled sheets. The linen is pulled away from him by a woman the audience has not met. The mess is revealed. And then the scene ends. For anyone who has not seen the film, this brief vignette, detached from any wider narrative, would make little sense. For those who have seen it, the effect is simply: remember this? It was funny, wasn’t it? The same pattern repeats with the job interview scene in which Spud takes speed, the opiate suppositories and other familiar moments.

Between these thin replicas sits what is essentially a jukebox musical. The characters sing along to Lust for Life, Perfect Day and Atomic. A few additional numbers are inserted, but they are borrowed from other hit films of the 1990s and 2000s: Republica’s Drop Dead Gorgeous, used in Scream, and a reasonably strong rendition of Gary Jules’ cover of Mad World, used in Donnie Darko. The handful of original songs are, quite literally, forgettable: I cannot remember any of them.

You can never go back

The cast work hard with the material, but who could match the charisma of Ewan McGregor, Jonny Lee Miller, Ewen Bremner and Robert Carlyle? Not this ensemble.

The production occasionally comes close to escaping its worst instincts when it departs from the film. A road trip to Blackpool and a subplot involving Renton’s brother, a soldier stationed in Northern Ireland, at least suggest a degree of ambition. Even there, however, the show frequently leans into social commentary that takes any subtext and turns it into text: underlined, bolded and italicised.

That is a shame, because there is no obvious reason Trainspotting could not work as a musical. The American Psycho musical, for example, combined familiar scenes with surreal vignettes, including a number in which human-sized designer shopping bags parade around the stage. It is absurd and brilliant. Trainspotting the Musical has no comparable vision and no real aspiration beyond completing a bingo card of scenes that made audiences smile in 1996.