Theatre Royal, Haymarket, London, until 5th September
When I heard that Irvine Welsh was mounting a musical of his 1993 novel Trainspotting, I had to check the calendar to make sure it wasn’t April Fools’ Day.
An all-singing, all-dancing show based on a book about Scottish heroin addicts? It sounded almost as bad as Springtime for Hitler, Mel Brooks’s feelgood musical about the Third Reich.
Springtime for Hitler was a show within a show in Brooks’s brilliant showbiz satire The Producers – about a bid to mount the world’s worst musical, which accidentally becomes a so-bad-it’s-brilliant hit. I hoped this strange spectacle would turn out to be something similar. Sadly, no such luck. Unlike The Producers, this musical rarely raises a laugh. And, unlike Springtime for Hitler, it’s not quite bad enough to tip over into farce.
There have been many successful musicals about bleak, depressing subjects. Les Misérables, based on the novel by Victor Hugo, is the best example. Then why does Trainspotting the Musical ring so false? It’s because musical theatre is an intrinsically sentimental art form – and Trainspotting, unlike Les Mis, is an intrinsically unsentimental book.
Welsh’s intoxicating story is full of heartbreak: the baby killed by neglect while Mum and Dad are high on heroin; the sporty lad who becomes an addict and dies of AIDS. Yet what made his novel so alluring was the callous candour of its drug-addled narrator, Renton – numbed by his addiction, like the shell-shocked survivor of a savage war. To accommodate that narrative voice within a musical was always going to be an uphill task.
Danny Boyle’s 1996 movie was more upbeat than the book, but it retained enough of the horror and squalor of the novel to feel like a faithful adaptation. This stage version feels like a crude, distorted echo. The plot is authentic and so is the dialogue, but the overall tone seems entirely wrong.
As our own A N Wilson once observed, to write a bad book takes a lot of effort. The same could be said of a bad musical. This cast act their socks off, to no avail. When they’re only acting, they do perfectly well, but when they’re compelled to sing and dance, the whole thing comes crashing down. There’s not much wrong with their singing or their dancing. It’s simply that the story and the music don’t fit together – not at all. The score plays out like a surreal intrusion from a completely different show.
The kindest thing to say about the songs (music and lyrics by Stephen McGuinness and Irvine Welsh, plus others) is that I found them utterly forgettable, apart from a bizarre country and western number, which lingers in the memory for all the wrong reasons.
The score is bolstered by several evergreen classics, including ‘Perfect Day’ and ‘Lust for Life’, which both featured in the movie. These familiar anthems give the show a lift, but also reveal the paucity of the new material. You’d need to be a musical genius to match Lou Reed or Iggy Pop, and neither comparison is flattering.
Welsh also wrote the script and there’s really nothing wrong with that. If you stripped out all the music, you’d be left with a compact, straight play, a competent homage to the novel and the movie. That would be the only way to rescue this confused, confusing show.
Lewis Kidd shines as Renton – meaner and nastier than Ewan McGregor in the film. Finlay Paul brings tender pathos to the tragic role of Tommy, and Frankie O’Connor plays Begbie with a disturbing blend of affability and psychosis. All three actors deserve to be in a much better show.
A theatre review isn’t an end-of-term report, written for the cast and crew. It’s a letter to you, dear readers, advising you whether or not to spend a large chunk of your hard-earned cash on an expensive night out at the theatre, and my earnest advice to you is absolutely not to.
It’s a common misconception that theatre critics must rub their hands with glee whenever they get the chance to slag off a stinker. I can’t speak for my fellow hacks but, for me, nothing could be further from the truth.
My heart sinks when I end up seeing a show as misconceived as this one. But when I do, it’s my duty to the art form I love to tell everyone I can to steer well clear.
