Lewis Kidd’s Mark Renton in the London run of Trainspotting The Musical at Theatre Royal Haymarket. Picture: Matt Crockett, supplied by Neil Redding PR
TRAINSPOTTING The Musical has been derailed before setting off on a tour that would have disembarked at the Grand Opera House, York, in November.
“Closed” reads the notice on the GOH website after poor reviews of the London premiere and equally poor ticket sales nationwide, not least in Edinburgh, the setting for Irvine Welsh’s story, where the tour’s opening week at the Edinburgh Playhouse from October 19 to 24 had attracted only 19 per cent ticket sales, according to a Facebook post by performer and resident director Keiran Brown.
Tickets for the York run from November 10 to 14 will be refunded. Ticket holders are being contacted by their point of purchase.
The world premiere will continue its London debut at the Theatre Royal Haymarket until September 5, as planned. All tour details have been removed from the official website.
A statement from the production company says: “The forthcoming UK tour of Trainspotting The Musical, which was due to begin on 19 October, has been cancelled.
“We are very grateful to our cast, crew and creative team for their dedication to the production, but the current economic climate has resulted in lower than expected ticket sales. Ticketholders will be contacted by their point of purchase with full refund details. We apologise for any inconvenience and disappointment this may cause.”
The poster for the now-cancelled tour of Trainspotting The Musical
Presented by Phil McIntyre Live, the musical is written by Welsh, based on his 1993 debut novel that was turned into an iconoclastic film by Danny Boyle in 1996 with a script by Welsh, centred on rapscallion heroin addict Mark Renton and his dysfunctional circle of friends navigating the chaotic highs and brutal lows of addiction, poverty and aimlessness in Leith as they struggle to break free from smackhead self-destruction.
Directed and developed by Caroline Jay Ranger – who was at the helm of John Cleese’s Fawlty Towers The Play, whose tour played the Grand Opera House in May – the musical features music and lyrics by Stephen McGuinness and Welsh. Their score includes tracks associated with the original film alongside new material written for the stage.
Boyle’s Trainspotting was the highest-grossing UK film release of 1996, won the BAFTA Award for Best Screenplay and was later ranked in the British Film Institute list of the 100 greatest British films of the 20th century.
The 2026 musical carried the billing: “Thirty years on from the film that changed everything…this show is expected to transport you back to the Nineties”, declaring that that “Renton, Sick Boy, Begbie, Spud, Tommy and Kelly, the industrial drug-crazed working-class heroes, are back”.
The Grand Opera House site website’s show details stated: “In 1996, CHOOSE LIFE sounded like a challenge. Thirty years on, the landscape has shifted, but the hunger hasn’t. Addiction hasn’t disappeared – it’s shifted. It’s quieter now, more embedded. Less needle, more screen. Less escape, more repetition. The same restless search for something to fill the space.
“The musical highlights the world we see changing around us, the obscene concentration of wealth, economic and political power in the hands of so few people. It addresses the modern culture of powerlessness. Art the singing-and-dancing Trojan horse that delivers direction and relevance.
Robbie Scott: Cast as Mark Renton for UK tour of Trainspotting: The Musical. Robbie, from Aberdeen, missed out on the West End opening after breaking his back in rehearsals and will miss out on the show altogether. Picture: Matt Crockett, supplied by Neil Redding PR
“This isn’t nostalgia, it’s closer than that. The past isn’t revisited – it lingers. The musical doesn’t tidy it. It sits with it. Listens to it. And lets it sing. New songs, classic songs, a musical like never before. Not for the easily confronted. It’s funny, loud, dynamic, and brings a dark dangerous energy never experienced before on the West End stage.”
In April, Welsh proclaimed: “I believe the musical has a bigger, loudly beating human heart than either the book or the film. People need to think about the world we’re living in, and we offer that inspection, but they also really need to sing their hearts out and laugh their heads off – it’s what being human is all about.”
On Monday morning, before the tour cancellation notice served later in the day, he revealed to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme listeners: “We are in difficult times and we’ve been looking at the numbers and sums. We knew it would be difficult to take a production of that scale on the road. We’ve got 30 cast members. Basically people just don’t have the money. It’s not a great time to be putting a new show on the road.”
Reflecting on the shellacking from West End critics, encapsulated in a one-star Guardian review, Welsh told Today presenter Amol Rajan: “I’m not the kind of writer that is loved by the critics. I tend to be a polarising force. I think it’s the way I go about these things and the way I write.”
Arifa Akbar’s verdict in the Guardian had lamented: “Sadly, the drug-addled escapades and illegal highs here look about as dangerous as a double-dose of Gaviscon.” She deemed McGuinness and Welsh’s songs to be “forgettable at best, or best forgotten in the case of one with a country and western twang”, concluding that “it all seems so tame and commercial for this bunch of anti-capitalists. A bad trip indeed.”
The tour publicity ended: “There are no clean answers here. Only incredible music and flashes of clarity, humour, and the uneasy sense of recognition. CHOOSE LIFE.”
Alas, the tour producers have had to choose premature death instead.