Article #85448

Theatre Royal Haymarket, London
The chopped-up story means this ends up feeling like a weak impersonation of Danny Boyle’s classic film

“Choose life …” Those iconic words from that era-defining film are said more than once in this musical take on Irvine Welsh’s novel about Renton and his renegade gang of smackheads from Leith.

“Choose being in the moment,” says the disembodied voice that asks us to switch off our mobile phones before the show has begun (with, one imagines, a self-satisfied glint at the joke). “Choose life,” repeats Renton (Lewis Kidd), trying so hard, it seems, to capture the dangerous energy of that moment in the 1990s when Ewan McGregor, Jonny Lee Miller and co depicted heroin addiction as a protest against the grunting conventions of ordinary life.