The list goes on. Still, this revival didn't quite get the critics high. It's a fascinating phenomenon in theatre when a major new musical becomes one of the season's most talked-about shows for all the wrong reasons. But as the saying goes, "there's no such thing as bad publicity". Will this be the case for Trainspotting The Musical, the stage adaptation of Irvine Welsh's iconic novel and the cult-classic film that has left a lasting legacy on popular British culture?

One thing is certain: a one-star-rated show can be just as entertaining as a five-star one.

Let's go full steam ahead into the critic reviews!

BOOK TICKETS

Trainspotting The Musical Critic Reviews

"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. Sadly, the drug-addled escapades and illegal highs here look about as dangerous as a double-dose of Gaviscon."

- The Guardian

"Cringe and boredom in one misconceived package that's only shocking in all the wrong ways. Welcome to Trainspotting The Musical, which looks about as at home in the gilt and plush surroundings of its current Theatre Royal Haymarket home as a vegan in a steak house."

- WhatsOnStage

"What results is a kind of hybrid jukebox show, one that at points almost feels like a 90s nostalgia fest, but makes an awkward vehicle for a bleak story of broken characters seeking highs against a backdrop of urban decline. They include Renton (Lewis Kidd), Sick Boy (Sheridan Townsley), Spud (Kieran Andrew), Tommy (Finlay Paul), and Begbie (Frankie O'Connor), all friends who in a previous generation would have been working the Leith docks but are now rudderless in every sense."

- London Theatre

"Trainspotting with jazz hands and hoedowns? This musical is a muddle. A handful of moving performances are overwhelmed by weak new songs and an uncertain vision for the stage."

- The Telegraph

"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."

- The Standard

"Why tho?' is the main question that's been floating around since the announcement came that Trainspotting was being turned into a musical. After all, Irvine Welsh's gritty depiction of drug addiction and deprivation in 1990s Edinburgh doesn't exactly lend itself to jazz hands. Sadly, having sat through all two-and-a-half-hours of what amounts to a pile-up of bizarre artistic choices, I'm here to tell you that scepticism is entirely founded. Landing exactly 30 years after Danny Boyle's stunning film version, this is not so much a homage to Renton, Spud, Sick Boy and the gang (though characters are styled to look like their on-screen counterparts), but a soiling of their memory."

- Time Out Worldwide