The show – featuring the key characters and sharing the novel’s themes of escapism and nihilism, exuberance and despair – boldly launches into the Theatre Royal Haymarket with no industry-standard out-of-town try-outs. It includes no-punches-pulled showstoppers such as C—s Run the Country, a crudely on-the-nose but hilarious socio-political polemic.
I was lucky enough to witness that number, the production’s musical standout, when I saw a dress-rehearsal of the show in a cavernous facility in Harlesden, north-west London. The song is a typically Welsh-ian, scabrous satirical hoedown. It features the cast line-dancing en masse while giant screens display pictures of a rogue’s gallery of political leaders.
As Welsh puts it, they include “Thatcher, Farage, Johnson, Truss, Blair, probably Burnham but certainly through to Starmer. All these horrendous b—–ds. You want audiences to be annoyed – and to have a laugh at these f—ers.”
Still, even with that baked-in, decades-deep Trainspotting fandom, what audiences will make of this all-singing, all-dancing and, yes, occasionally feel-good musical about a bunch of Eighties Edinburgh junkies is anyone’s guess. So how on Earth has it come about?
Welsh admits that, for all the adaptations and spin-offs, he himself couldn’t see how Trainspotting would work in this medium. But leading stage producer Phil McIntyre, as keenly aware as anyone of the proven bums-on-seats value of the Trainspotting IP, “had been at me for years to do a musical”, the author, now 67, tells me when we meet in Soho’s private members’ club The Groucho. “And I resisted doing it for so long.”