Trainspotting the Musical Trades the Film’s Grime for Karaoke Night at the Theatre Royal Haymarket

Trainspotting the Musical | Theatre Royal Haymarket until 5th September 2026

Irvine Welsh’s stage reinvention of Trainspotting softens the edges that made the original a classic

Thirty years after Danny Boyle’s film first hit screens, Renton, Sick Boy, Begbie, Spud, Tommy, and Kelly are back, this time, somewhat incongruously, on the stage of the Theatre Royal Haymarket in Trainspotting the Musical.

Irvine Welsh has revisited his earlier work, Skagboys, to flesh out the characters for this new incarnation, essentially building on the world of the film rather than simply transferring it. It’s a shift that makes sense on paper: a fast, brilliant ninety-minute film has to stretch to fill a two-hour-twenty musical, and that means finding more than songs and dancing to fill the gaps.

The trouble is what fills them. Where the film was grimy, dangerous, and unflinching, the musical is curiously timid. We get the dirty sheets but no bed in sight, with poor Spud left teetering on stage clutching a sheet. The toilet scene arrives via projection, lifted more or less straight from the film, and the pieces get shuffled around, but none of the grit, the grime, the edge, or the imagination of the original survives the journey. Compare that with Beetlejuice the Musical down the road at the Prince Edward, which somehow found real feeling underneath all that chaos rather than losing it in translation. Trainspotting never manages the same trick.

The original film allowed us to draw our own conclusions from the events on screen. Here, we are subjected to numerous first-person monologues telling us how bad and terrible things are, breaking one of theatre’s key rules: “show, don’t tell.”

Then there are the new songs, written by Irvine Welsh and DJ producer Steve Mac, some of the most banal, trite, foul-mouthed lyrics it has ever been my displeasure to hear. One of them contains the repeated lyric “the c@*nts run the country.” We’re treated to this twice, landing bafflingly in the middle of a line-dancing number that comes from nowhere. Also I won’t say the choreography is bad; I’ll just say I could do something like it myself!

None of which is the cast’s fault. They’ve had to reverse-engineer themselves into characters and performances that already exist fully formed in the public imagination, and they are entirely exonerated from anything I say here. Louis Khalid works hard as Renton. Kieran Andrew’s Spud unfortunately verges on caricature. Frankie O’Connor’s Begbie, though, is brilliant and genuinely terrifying on stage. The mothers have been expanded and given more to say, though there were points where I could have done with surtitles!

Set the new songs against the handful of genuine classics the show also uses, and the gap only widens. When “Mad World” turned up, all I could think was what a wonderful film Donnie Darko is, which tells you roughly how engaged I was by that point. Donnie Darko remains one of my favourite films, and the way it uses music is genuinely brilliant. This isn’t.

The critical reception to this has been almost universally bad, with a plethora of one and two star reviews. Now, this is no indication of a show’s failure, as you only need to look at the critical reaction to Les Misérables to see a show that triumphed over bad reviews. However, we are far from the calibre of that show here! Interestingly, Irvine Welsh has taken to his Instagram account in response to this reaction to say his production is “way too cool for west end theatre land.” Which seems both an insult to West End Theatre and to his potential audiences!

We are asked several times during the course of the show to “choose life.” My advice would be to choose something else.

If you want to see what happens when a show tries to out-shock a film that already shocked a generation, and comes up short, this is the one to watch, but go in expecting karaoke, not carnage, and EyeOnLondon would say save your money for something with teeth.

For more London arts and culture, visit EyeOnLondon at eye-on-london.com.

[Image Credits | Matt Crockett]

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