Trainspotting the Musical: A bad, bad trip down memory lane
Trainspotting the Musical | Theatre Royal Haymarket | ★☆☆☆☆
I was 13 when Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting adaptation was released – I’d never seen anything like it and it became a seminal text of my teenage years. Two decades later, I luxuriated in the condensed hit of nostalgia of the 2017 sequel. I’ve read the books: not just the original – a stone-cold classic – but the various follow-ups and spin-offs, even after the quality became… patchy. The pub where Begbie tossed a pint pot over the balcony (The Crosslands in Glasgow) used to be my local. I’ve even interviewed Irvine Welsh over a steak dinner.
This is all to say: Trainspotting the Musical feels designed to appeal to me, specifically, especially as it was created by Welsh himself. And if I hate it as much as I do – which is a lot – what on earth is everyone else going to make of it?
Trainspotting the Musical: Utterly in thrall to Danny Boyle
The alarm bells begin to jangle immediately. If you include the “Choose turning off your mobile phone, choose being in the moment” preamble, the famous Choose Life speech is rattled through three times within the first five minutes, setting the tone for a production that’s utterly in thrall to Danny Boyle’s 1996 movie. The characters dress the same, they share the same mannerisms, they recreate the same scenes, sometimes in slavish detail, other times in such a perfunctory fashion that it feels like an exercise in box-ticking.
Take the famous ‘Spud shits the bed’ scene: here it’s stripped of all context. Spud is suddenly naked, holding an armful of soiled linen. It’s wrested from him by a lady we haven’t met. We see the foul mess. And… scene. If you hadn’t watched the movie, this little vignette, unmoored from any broader narrative, would make no sense. And if you have… Remember this? Funny wasn’t it? This happens again and again: the job interview scene where Spud takes speed, the opiate suppositories…
Between these shallow facsimiles lies what is essentially a jukebox musical. The characters sing along to Lust for Life, Perfect Day, Atomic. A couple of additional numbers are squeezed in, but they’re lifted from other hit films from the 1990s and 2000s: Republica’s Drop Dead Gorgeous, featured in Scream, and an admittedly quite good rendition of Gary Jules’ cover of Mad World, used in Donnie Darko. The handful of original songs are, quite literally, forgettable: I can’t remember any of them.
You can never go back
The cast do their best with the material but who can live up to the charisma of Ewan McGregor, Jonny Lee Miller, Ewen Bremner and Robert Carlyle? Not this bunch.
The production occasionally threatens to stop being quite so crap when it deviates from the movie: a road-trip to Blackpool, a sub-plot involving Renton’s brother, a soldier stationed in Northern Ireland. At least these scenes show a modicum of ambition, although I could have done without the frequent bouts of social commentary that take any subtext and make it text, underlined, put in bold, italicised.
It’s a shame: there’s no reason Trainspotting shouldn’t work as a musical. The American Psycho musical, for instance, blended familiar scenes with surreal vignettes including a number where human-sized designer shopping bags parade around the stage. It’s bonkers and brilliant. There’s no such vision here, no real aspiration beyond filling up a bingo card of scenes that made us smile back in 1996.