Lewis Kidd’s shaved-headed, jeans-clad Renton is the blunt centre of the Trainspotting the Musical review, but says the result at the Theatre Royal Haymarket feels like a weak impersonation of Danny Boyle’s film. The songs land even flatter, leaving the stage version dragged down by a structure that never fully earns its own shape.
Theatre Royal Haymarket in London
The review places the production at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in London, with Irvine Welsh’s story now pushed through Caroline Jay Ranger’s direction and a cast led by Kieran Andrew as Spud, Frankie O’Connor as Begbie, Rosie Dignan as Alison and Finlay Paul as Tommy. That ensemble gives the show its faces, but the writing leaves them visibly modelled on the film actors and still cardboard-flat.
Lewis Kidd’s Renton is not the only part built around a recognisable template. The review notes Begbie as a pub psychopath with a moustache, Sick Boy as cocksure with dyed blond hair, and Spud as a twitching dork, so the production keeps reaching for shorthand rather than building new dramatic weight onstage.
Stephen McGuinness and Irvine Welsh
The sharpest criticism lands on the music. The songs written by Stephen McGuinness and Irvine Welsh are described as forgettable at best, with one number carrying a country and western twang and another sounding alarmingly like a riff on The Proclaimers, while the cover selections from Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life and Lou Reed’s Perfect Day do the heavier lifting.
That imbalance matters because the show is selling itself on a return to familiar material, yet the review says the chopped-up story turns that return into imitation rather than renewal. Even the group trip to Blackpool for a northern soul gig, the speed-fuelled job interview by Spud, the snooker-table violence from Begbie and Renton’s toilet high are presented as fragments rather than a cleaner dramatic line.
1993 and the franchise
The review also complicates the advertising line that these characters are back “30 years on” from Danny Boyle’s film. Welsh’s novel was published in 1993, and the Trainspotting story has kept moving since then through one prequel, three sequels, one stage play and T2 Trainspotting, so the stage version is entering a franchise that never really stopped rather than reopening a sealed ending.
That is why the verdict reads so hard: when the musical leans on the film’s image set and the novel’s old shocks, it needs songs that can justify the transfer to the stage. Instead, the production comes off as a thin echo, and Lewis Kidd’s Renton ends up carrying a show that keeps borrowing from better-known versions of the story.
