What’s that dull, sickening thud? Oh, it’s the sound of a dead horse being flogged. Since Irvine Welsh’s nonlinear novel about losers and addicts in Edinburgh’s impoverished Leith went from underground cult to breakout hit in 1993 it’s spawned plays, films, sequels and one of the finest soundtrack albums ever.
Now, with grim inevitability, the antics of Renton, Sick Boy, Begbie, Spud et al has become a woefully misconceived West End musical. It’s leaden and formulaic where the book was coruscatingly fragmentary, sermonising and expository where Danny Boyle’s 1996 film was darkly, hedonistically propulsive.
