The first time Renton shoots up with Sick Boy in the new Trainspotting stage musical, they rise from the floor after an orgasmic groan — and start line dancing. The song, titled “C*nts Run The Country,” was written by house DJ Steve Mac with some contribution from Irvine Welsh, who co-created the show with Stephen McGuinness. The rest of the cast, wearing Stetsons, join in for a do-si-do.
The moment, which one critic described as putting “line dancing at the heart of the heroin experience,” is emblematic of the show’s broader problems. The New Statesman review, published after Wednesday night’s premiere at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in London’s West End, concluded that the adaptation “has more lows than highs.”
“Trainspotting musical premiere criticised for line-dancing heroin scenes and weak music, with more lows than highs.”
The musical, based on Welsh’s 1993 novel and Danny Boyle’s 1996 film, follows the same group of Edinburgh misfits. Lewis Kidd plays Renton and Sheridan Townsley plays Sick Boy. But the music — a central problem for a musical — “bears not a hint of the era in which it is set,” the review notes. The show opens more like The Commitments, with “everyone strutting and swaggering to a vaguely rockabilly beat,” then makes forays into 1970s disco. There are also theatrical moves reminiscent of the mockumentary Waiting for Guffman: chairs commandeered to make bus seats, the cast bouncing along on their bums.
For those who remember Trainspotting as a cultural touchstone of the late 1990s — arriving at the tail end of the rave scene, when heroin had a place among the Britpop elite — the country-music treatment feels jarring. Welsh’s novel was an indictment of Thatcher’s 1980s, which in Glasgow ended six decades of shipbuilding, but the social commentary largely passed by the 1990s students who had the orange-and-white poster on their walls.
The premiere brought together Welsh, McGuinness and a red-carpet crowd at the historic West End venue. Yet the early verdict suggests the show may struggle to match the cult status of its predecessors. As one critic put it: “All those love songs to horse written over the years — ‘There She Goes’, ‘Golden Brown’, ‘Perfect Day’ — and ‘C*nts Run The Country’ is what we end up with.”