Trainspotting the musical: Woefully misconceived ★☆☆☆☆

What’s that dull, sickening thud? Oh, it’s the sound of a dead horse being flogged. Since Irvine Welsh’s nonlinear novel about losers and addicts in Edinburgh’s impoverished Leith went from underground cult to breakout hit in 1993 it’s spawned plays, films, sequels and one of the finest soundtrack albums ever.

Now, with grim inevitability, the antics of Renton, Sick Boy, Begbie, Spud et al has become a woefully misconceived West End musical. It’s leaden and formulaic where the book was coruscatingly fragmentary, sermonising and expository where Danny Boyle’s 1996 film was darkly, hedonistically propulsive.

Worse, it shackles emotively Pavlovian stalwart hits like Lust For Life, Perfect Day and Bitter Sweet Symphony to a ragbag of pub-rock novelty songs written by Welsh and Stephen McGuinness.

As Steve Mac, the latter has apparently been a house producer and remixer for decades, m’lud. You wouldn’t necessarily know that from the mawkish ballads, grumpy laments and other dimwit genre spoofs he and Welsh serve up here. The C&W line dance number with the chorus “c***s run the country” is particularly egregious.

The production - developed, directed and nominally choreographed by Caroline Jay Ranger - is underpowered and pedestrian. A saving grace is Lewis Kidd, who is impressively loose and cocky as the shaven headed antihero Renton, having stepped into the role after the original actor, Robbie Scott, suffered a rehearsal injury.

Rosie Dignan also acts affectingly in her stage debut as junkie Alison, whose baby dies while she’s injecting smack into the “big blue vein of her milk-bottle white arm”, though her singing voice is underpowered.

But otherwise, where do I start? The musical makes implicit politics explicit, with regular monologues about how there’s “nae jobs” because of Thatcher and how heroin is really no different to booze, tabs and consumerism as a tool to subdue the underclass. This makes the “choose life” monologue from Boyle’s film sound like Thomas Piketty.

Renton’s waste of his own life is starkly contrasted with that of a brother in the British Army in Ulster, potentially killing and eventually being killed. Parents, and religion, play a bigger part than in previous adaptations. Trainspotting’s original energy was unapologetic, but here everyone is endlessly explaining or lamenting. “Please dinnae let him be on that stuff – that HEROIN!” mewls Renton’s mum (Rebecca McKinnis).

Previously the chemical formula of the product has been tweaked to serve each new iteration. Here, the creators clearly feel they must lamely emulate well-known lines and set pieces from the first movie: Spud soiling himself and gurning through a job interview on speed; Renton diving into the “worst toilet in Scotland” to retrieve accidentally evacuated opium suppositories. The latter is done through a projected fantasy submersion, you’ll be pleased to hear.

I could tell you how sketchy the set and the choreography are, how Welsh’s trademark sweariness and his “authentic” Scottish-English argot lapse here into pastiche. I could say that the characters, always boldly outlined, are here cartoonish. Frankie O’Connor’s psychotic Begbie looks like Oswald Mosely reimagined as a muscled Marvel supervillain. He’s also the production’s Resident Fight Director, which made me laugh.

I can’t tell you what this show wants to be but it definitely doesn’t want to be a musical. The songs, whether established hits or awful new numbers, creep sheepishly into the narrative rather than growing from it. There is no sense of shape or progression in the score, just a meandering from situation to situation, and song to song.

The actors look embarrassed whenever they have to trade dialogue for music. At one point the three young female leads sing Republica’s Drop Dead Gorgeous into upside down brick phones for no discernible reason. I’m sorry, what?

I saw Trainspotting the Musical the night before its official opening but can’t believe it will have found a purpose in the intervening 24 hours. Choose the pub, choose the Odyssey, choose a night in watching Bargain Hunt.. but above all, choose something else.

To 5 Sept, trainspottingthemusical.co.uk.

To receive the best stories in your inbox every day, click here to register for one or more newsletters from The Standard.