Trainspotting the Musical - Theatre Royal Haymarket

Trainspotting the Musical (believe it or not). Photo credit: Matt Crockett

Choose life, as Trainspotting famously put it.

Choose a major West End playhouse for a show that would probably work a bit better in a smaller off-West End venue. Like The Other Palace.

Studio.

But it would only be a bit better there, because it’s all over the place, and it would probably have had a flurry of one and two star reviews regardless.

Choose to open the second act with a random line dancing country song.

Choose to portray a heroin high as a device to get away from something without specifying what that something is.

Choose soulless and emotionless ways of portraying heartbreak and loss of life in an absurdly melodramatic way.

Choose overacting like hell to the point where hardly anyone or anything is believable.

Choose crowbarring The Verve’s ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’ and Republica’s ‘Drop Dead Gorgeous’ for no reason other than they were released around the same time as the story happened to be set.

Choose crowbarring ‘Perfect Day’, released in 1972, when there is nothing remotely perfect about anyone’s day.

Choose Scottish “accents” that go off on UK and International Tours all by themselves.

Choose to portray druggies as the polished professional singers and dancers that the actors cast in those roles actually are rather than the characters they are playing.

Choose depicting rough, rugged, gritty and no-nonsense 1990s Edinburgh as soppy and sentimental instead of savage and sordid.

Choose lines that make no sense. “Heroin loves misery and misery loves company”. WTF?

Choose doing the toilet scene (you know the one) but in such a way that is too, um, sanitised.

Choose a set design that is so unimaginative you can’t even tell if it’s night or day.

Choose having sections of spoken dialogue that go on for so long you don’t even know if you’re watching a musical or a play anymore.

Choose charging £10 for a programme but having a strapline on your website that says “This show will transport you back to the nineties”. When programmes were something like £2.50.

Choose flogging a dead horse instead of leaving a decent film and novel alone.

Choose a cross between a ‘don’t take drugs’ lecture and a glorified karaoke session.

Choose limpness instead of energy. Choose order over chaos. Choose apathy over impatience. Choose a fu*king risk assessment over “get on wit’ it!”.

Choose life... but why would you want to do a thing like that?

Whether you do or not, don’t choose Trainspotting the Musical. Be like Renton and choose “somethin’ else”. Choose a Peruvian bear calling for kindness and civility. Choose a bunch of students in a French revolution (but not “the” French revolution) dying for their cause. Choose a canoe in the sewer, aka The Phantom of the Opera. Stuff it. Choose a green witch defying gravity. Or – if you really want to know my current favourite in the West End – choose Avenue Q.

Zero stars