Renton, Sick Boy, Begbie, Spud, Tommy, and Kelly, the industrial drug-crazed working-class heroes, are back.
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.
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.
“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.” Irvine Welsh, April 2026
There are no clean answers here. Only incredible music and flashes of clarity, humour, and the uneasy sense of recognition.
CHOOSE LIFE.
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Regent Theatre, Stoke-on-Trent
The Regent Theatre opened in 1929 as a super cinema. Following a three year £23 million development of the city centre, The Regent Theatre was reopened on 22 September 1999 and since then has hosted a number of shows and musicals including the National Theatre's production of War Horse, Mamma Mia! and Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake.