Review: TRAINSPOTTING THE MUSICAL, Theatre Royal Haymarket

The sleepless nights, waking up intermittently, sweating, in fear of the day to come. The continual fatigue as your life shrinks and shrinks to the size of your own, increasingly messy flat, with previous standards of hygiene almost impossible to maintain. Most of all, the fact that the source of all this chaos keeps pulling you back, the addiction you can’t kick, on your mind. 

I missed seeing Trainspotting at the cinema because I was being a parent 24/7 back then and that left no space for a fix of culture to relieve the pressure.

Mark Renton and his junkie friends (that film poster was iconic wasn’t it?) reach the state I describe above voluntarily - well, kinda voluntarily - without a baby to look after, seeking something, anything, to break the tedium of living in Leith, like Liverpool, an early victim of postindustrialism. The Edinburgh adjacent (but oh so different) town was left behind before most of the country realised they were going somewhere themselves. We know this because, in a show that does not like to leave anything unsaid that can be said, and anything said once that can be said twice, we’re told it - often.

We first meet our motley crew in a social club in which you can all but feel the stickiness on the tables, see the wall’s yellowing after absorbing nicotine for decades, the smoking and absence of phones more effective than carbon dating in screaming “It’s the early 90s!”. It’s also sex and drugs and rock’n’roll from then on, as that mantra’s high priest, Iggy Pop, lending his “Lust for Life” to the story once again.

This marks the first of two problems that hobble the show from the outset. The singing, as is often the case with jukebox musicals (semi-jukebox in this case) is a little imprecise, rock songs seldom needing the clarity in vocals that musical theatre demands. 

That issue is exacerbated by an almost insurmountable dilemma for a show like this - accents. Take this from a man with a distinctive working class accent myself, when I go to Scotland, it always takes a few hours to attune the ear to the rhythms of speech, the speed of speaking and the differences in vowels. Obviously, to ease back on any element of Trainspotting’s rootedness in its time and place would be tantamount to treason, but it’s really hard to catch the dialogue even having grown up nearer Glasgow than London.

You do need as much help as you can get, as there’s a dizzying array of lads and others on stage to keep track of, introduced by Renton, as Dickens did, with little pen portraits. But there’s so many, especially with some parents involved now too, that it’s really hard to hold them all in your head, and, despite a two hours plus run time, not much opportunity for them to develop beyond types. 

So we get the fighty one, Begbie (Frankie O’Connor, who looks and walks like Mark Rylance in Jerusalem), the ladies man, Sick Boy (Sheridan Townsley, much the best singer on stage) and the naive, idealistic one, Tommy (Finlay Paul) whose end is bleedin’ obvious from the start. The women don’t fare too well, getting the blame, at least partially, for much of the lads’ excessive risk-taking. Rosie Dignan and Sophie Hutchinson do what they can as Alison and Lizzie, but they’re thin characters indeed in a show of thin characterisations.

Lewis Kidd has the best shot of connecting with us as Renton, since he is both a main character and the narrator and comes with plenty of charm, but I wondered why I was continually surprised by what he did, especially at the end. Part of that will be the fact that I’m in a small minority who has seen neither the film nor read the book, but mainly it’s the episodic nature of what has come before, events piling on top of one another, life-changing moments skipping by like a round of shots at the bar. 

Between the callbacks to the movie soundtrack, Stephen McGuinness and Irvine Welsh have written new songs of variable quality. They must have been very pleased with “The Eckies And The Brown”, one even more flushed with Fs and Cs than the others, because we get this bizarre line dancing number in Swiftie costumes twice. I guess somebody had to like it.

There hangs the biggest issue for the production, one that experienced director, Caroline Jay Ranger cannot power through - this is Welsh and McGuinness’s first foray into musical theatre. Like many artists successful in other fields (as evidenced in many a show I've seen down the years) I suspect they underestimated just how hard it is to work in this genre, even with IP as strong as this with name recognition to burn. It’s not quite a vanity project - there’s too much hard work evident for that damining verdict - but it’s not so far off.

They are not the first to learn that lesson about MT. They will not be the last.    

Trainspotting at the Theatre Royal Haymarket until 5 September and on tour

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