Review: TRAINSPOTTING THE MUSICAL, Theatre Royal Haymarket
Photo credit: Matt Crockett
Thirty years on from Danny Boyle's career-defining film adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s novel, we now have a musical adaptation of the same name.
Playing at Theatre Royal Haymarket, the same career-defining reputation of the story’s earlier iterations will unlikely be afforded to this production. The show is a half book-accurate and half jukebox-adjacent song cycle that is wholly unsure of what it wants an audience to feel.
Welsh's original is a study fractured across timeline and prose, echoing the fractiousness and unreliability of the novel’s voice. A musical, by contrast, is a form built on emotional legibility where characters tell you, in melody, exactly what they want. Here, numbers arrive mid-scene like uninvited guests, deliver their point in the broadest possible terms, and depart without having deepened anything we didn't already know from the dialogue surrounding them. A heroin high becomes a generic anthem about escape; a heartbreak becomes a generic ballad about pain. The specificity that made Welsh's Edinburgh feel like nowhere else on earth gets sanded down into disappointing cliché.
It's not that the show is too dark for the Haymarket's gilt-and-plush surroundings; it's that the darkness here rarely lands with any weight. Scenes designed to shock pass by with the frictionless speed of a scene change, undercut by staging that seems more interested in choreographing the transition than sitting with the consequence. You leave unmoved not because the material has been softened for a paying crowd, but because nothing on stage seems to believe in its own stakes for longer than a musical number allows.
What keeps the evening from collapsing entirely is the cast, who work with a commitment the material rarely earns. In the central role, Lewis Kidd charts Renton's slide from wired charisma to hollowed-out exhaustion with a physical control that the show's music never quite gives him room to use. Similarly good work comes from Sheridan Townsley playing Sick Boy. Elsewhere, much of the cast are making their West End debuts and bring a commitment that papers over some of the structural cracks of the show.
Unfortunately, it isn't enough. A cast this able deserves songs with a point of view rather than mood-board approximations of gritty 90s Britain, and a production willing to trust silence, stillness, or plain dialogue when a scene has earned it, rather than reaching reflexively for the next number. As it stands, the show never quite decides whether it wants to interrogate addiction and deprivation or simply borrow their imagery for texture and that indecision is fatal.
An audience familiar with Welsh's savage wit and specificity will be shocked by this timorous production and may well ‘Choose’ elsewhere to spend their evenings.
*One star
Reviewed by: Jeff Mostyn
