A fair amount of effort has gone into explaining why this musical version of Irvine Welsh’s 1993 debut novel is as relevant now as when the film version was released 30 years ago.
Like the adaptations that have gone before (there has been a play as well as the era-defining Danny Boyle movie that launched Ewan McGregor’s career), this musical can never replicate the thrill of seeing the Roman alphabet phonetically spell out the broadest possible working class Edinburgh brogue.
Still, the fact that for London audiences it takes a while to become attuned to dialogue that sounds like a vomit wretch one moment and spoken word poetry the next, gives this show its authenticity. A shame then that the tour planned after this West End run has been cancelled and will therefore no longer reach Scotland and the audience best suited to the vernacular. Tickets are just not selling.
“If Edinburgh of all places is stuck at 19 per cent sales you know you’re f***ed,” said resident director and cast member Kieran Brown. Yet as committed as he and his fellow performers are, it cannot be said that the cancellation is a great loss.
The producers and director, Caroline Jay Ranger, have argued that Welsh’s story about a group of heroin addicts has much to say about addiction today. Rather than injecting narcotics with needles we now consume it through screens, the argument goes. There are also parallels about the absence of opportunity to be drawn.
Yet Renton (here Lewis Kidd), Sick Boy (Sheridan Townsley) Begbie (Frankie O’Conner) Spud (Kieran Andrew) and Tommy (Finlay Paul) are people of their time and place. And although the score – which mixes soundtrack from Boyle’s film with new tracks written by Stephen McGuinness and Welsh – works well, it doesn’t work well enough to offer something new to fans of the book and film. Nor does the music deliver anything essential to those who are coming to the work for the first time.
Still, there are some excellent performances. Among them Kieran Andrew whose crushingly gauche Spud seems among the most likely to survive the heroin scourge, until he doesn’t. The scene in which he goes for a job interview with so much speed in his blood it is as if he has plugged his body into the national grid is as funny as it is appalling.
Also worth a mention is O’Conner’s coiled Begbie (Robert Carlyle in the movie), who stalks the stage with the explosive potential of a live a grenade. Then there is the director, who has a track record of making surprisingly good theatre out of popular TV – namely Fawlty Towers and the musical version of Only Fools and Horses. Ranger does another excellent job at making a good show from material that is not an obvious choice for a stage production. But this adaptation doesn’t quite make the argument that it should exist.
Trainspotting the Musical
Theatre Royal Haymarket
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