It’s time someone took every West End producer by the hand, invited them to take a deep, steadying breath, and asked them to chant the mantra: ‘Not everything can or should be a musical.’
If only that intervention had happened before somebody looked at Trainspotting — a story about heroin addiction, poverty, AIDS, and the failure of the state in urban Scotland — and thought: you know what this needs? Jazz hands.
Irvine Welsh’s tale has already had more lives than most stories could dream of. It began as a 1993 novel before becoming a hit stage play, Danny Boyle’s era-defining 1996 film, a prequel, three sequels and T2 Trainspotting.
So really, short of a six-part prestige Sky Atlantic drama starring Stephen Graham, there was only one place left for it to go. Cue: Glitter and dance break.
But just because a story can keep mutating doesn’t mean it should.
Written by Welsh himself and directed by Caroline Jay Ranger, this latest incarnation never settles on what it wants to be. Comic scenes screech into power ballads with all the subtlety of a train derailment, while the pacing lurches from one iconic Trainspotting moment to the next as though it’s speed-running the greatest hits.
The original songs are largely forgettable, save for one spectacularly baffling number, in which the cast suddenly don cowboy hats. An audience member in front of me audibly groaned as the cast began speaking and singing in Western twangs for reasons that remain unclear.
Even when the covers of songs like Lou Reed’s Perfect Day come in, they feel like little more than pleasant reminders of a better film you could have spent your evening watching instead.
It’s a shame, because the cast deserve considerably better. They’re trapped playing characters who are either pale approximations of their film counterparts or strange composite sketches assembled from various corners of Welsh’s ever-expanding universe.
Kieran Andrew’s Spud is one of the few bright spots, with his disastrous job interview still proving as painfully funny as ever. Likewise, Alison’s baby’s death retains some emotional force, although even that devastating moment lands with far less impact than in Boyle’s film.
Elsewhere, though, every moment that should hit like a punch to the gut is softened by the demands of the genre.
Tommy’s tragic decline from the group’s healthiest member into heroin addiction feels oddly rushed, while Begbie’s terrifying unpredictability is flattened into theatrical bluster that just feels silly.
The production repeatedly mistakes recognition for reinvention. Iconic lines are wheeled out almost as applause cues, while familiar scenes arrive in a different order without ever revealing anything new about characters many audience members have known for three decades.
Even the staging struggles to evoke the grime and desperation of Leith, with rolling set pieces and projected backdrops lending everything an oddly sanitised feel.
That’s the fundamental problem. Trainspotting has always been very funny, but only because its humour exists alongside genuine horror. Danny Boyle constantly lulled you into laughing before reminding you just how much is at stake.
Here, every emotional gear change is accompanied by another musical number, leaving the whole thing feeling somewhere between an after-school anti-drugs assembly and a soft-grunge Eurovision entry.
The show felt a bit like someone chopping the head off a cow, replacing it with the head of a salmon, and then asking that chimera to swim upstream to spawn. It’s just not natural.
The earnestness inherent in musical theatre as a form is antithetical to Trainspotting’s ethos, with all its grittiness and refusal to conform. The last thing Sickboy would ever do is a peppy little jazz square, and yet he came very close to breaking out tap shoes in this West End flop.
Choose life. Choose a job. Choose to see any show but this.