The 1996 film was a miserable, sweaty downer that lacked any sense of aspirational aesthetics. But a new London stage production proves that with enough choreography, even systemic Scottish poverty can be a delightful weekend activity.
I was explaining this to my husband just the other night at a rather intimate dinner party in Notting Hill, shortly before we headed to the West End. We were debating the cultural legacy of the 1990s. Someone brought up Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh’s supposedly seminal tale of Edinburgh junkies, and I had to confess my truth: I have always found the original property incredibly difficult to romanticize.
The 1996 film, as I understand it from the trailer, featured a lot of very pale, very damp young men making deeply un-aspirational lifestyle choices. There was a profound lack of intentionality to their journey. But when I heard that producers were adapting this grim, working-class trauma into a premium musical at the Savoy Theatre, I felt a surge of hope. Finally, I thought, someone is going to give intravenous drug addiction the polish it has always lacked.
And I am pleased to report that the theatre world has delivered. If the original film was a terrifying plunge into the abyss of dependency, the new musical is the comforting comedown you experience on the third day of a £4,000 wellness retreat in Tuscany.
Call me old-fashioned, but I believe true art about the disenfranchised underclass should cost exactly as much as a bespoke facial. The pricing structure is actually a stroke of genius. By ensuring that nobody who has ever actually been on a council estate can afford to enter the auditorium, the producers have created a beautifully safe space for us to process their trauma for them. We can sit in the velvet stalls, sipping our £18 botanical gin fizzes, and safely observe the choreography of destitution without ever being exposed to the smell of actual desperation.
The creative liberties taken by the production team are simply inspired. The infamous worst toilet in Scotland sequence, which I am told was rather nauseating in the cinema, has been reimagined as an aquatic ballet. Our protagonist, Renton, dives into a pristine, LED-lit pool of biodegradable glitter while a chorus line of tap-dancing sanitation workers harmonize about the importance of municipal plumbing. It is visually stunning, and entirely removes the abrasive grit that always held the original story back from true commercial synergy.
We realized early on that modern theatregoers don’t want to see a literal depiction of squalor, so we replaced the dirty needles with glowing, metaphorical batons of suppressed trauma.
Fawsitt’s vision truly shines in the second act. The harrowing withdrawal scene where Renton hallucinates a dead infant crawling on the ceiling has been brilliantly smoothed over into a gravity-defying aerial silk routine. The baby, played by a very talented gymnast in a bedazzled onesie, flips gracefully above the stage to a jazz-inflected rendition of Lou Reed’s Perfect Day. It is giving Cirque du Soleil meets urban decay, and it completely reframes the narrative. Instead of a miserable addict suffering the physiological horrors of detox, Renton simply looks like a millennial struggling to maintain his personal boundaries.
But the true triumph of the evening is how the musical reinterprets the iconic Choose Life monologue. In the 90s, this was apparently a cynical, nihilistic rant against consumerism and the hollow promises of late-stage capitalism. Here on the London stage, delivered by a leading man with twelve-percent body fat and a perfect spray tan, it becomes what it was always meant to be: a sincere, Goop-adjacent affirmation checklist.
When he sings about choosing a washing machine, choosing good health, and choosing low cholesterol, it no longer sounds like a sarcastic rejection of middle-class mediocrity. It sounds like a perfectly reasonable set of goals for a Sunday reset. I found myself nodding along in the dress circle. I do choose good health. I do choose dental insurance. If these characters had just spent a little less time loitering in abandoned flats and a little more time practicing basic mindfulness, they probably would not have needed the methadone in the first place.
During the interval, I wandered out to the lobby and purchased an ethically sourced Choose Life tote bag for £45. As we left the theatre and stepped into our waiting car, I could not help but reflect on how far we have come as a society. We have finally figured out how to take the most depressing, abrasive elements of the late twentieth century and polish them into a lovely night out. The lust for life is not gone; it just requires a premium seating upgrade.