Curve Theatre, Leicester – until 24th May 2025
Reviewed by Amarjeet Singh
3***
Adapted from Paula Hawkins’ novel, The Girl on the Train follows Rachel Watson, who becomes fascinated by a seemingly perfect couple she watches from her train window on her way to work. A very heavy drinker, she manages to catch the train every morning to watch this couple, who happen to live a few doors away from her ex-husband, his new wife and their baby. When the woman in the couple disappears, Rachel decides to play sleuth and find out what happened. Interrogating the woman’s psychiatrist, befriending the male of the couple to glean information and working alongside the police as if one of their own, Rachel discovers the truth behind the apparent mystery.
There is so much crammed into this adaptation by Rachel Wagstaff and Duncan Abel, that relationships, motives and emotions come across as inauthentic. I couldn’t help but feel this play was reminiscent of another which left me puzzled by its adaptation, The Da Vinci Code. I was not surprised to find that Wagstaff and Abel were at the helm of that production. Not every successful novel transitions smoothly to the stage.
The storyline and characters are not believable. Rachel is struggling with alcoholism, yet she is able to catch the train every day to London to observe this couple she has fixated on. Why does she pretend she is still commuting to work after she has lost her job due to her alcoholism? She lives alone and has no one to be accountable to. She drinks herself into oblivion nightly, yet she can cohesively and articulately challenge a psychiatrist to find out crucial information about his patient (don’t get me started on ethics). She is also able to smoothly infiltrate the police on a high-profile missing person’s case, at one point wearing investigators coveralls. Not a hangover or daytime slur nor stumble in sight. It’s repeatedly stated that she is unreliable, yet she throws herself into playing drunk detective with aplomb and is surprisingly successful at it. Why she is taken seriously by the other characters is the real mystery of the tale, as her life is pretty much a dumpster fire, faced with eviction, struggling with her divorce and making drunk calls throughout the night, how she can make the professionals sing like canaries when questioned is beyond me. Characters flit from anger to tears in moments, ranting and raving only to recover themselves completely, moving on as if nothing happened.
The switches between flashbacks and reality are brilliantly done by the use of Jack Knowles spotlights and director Loveday Ingram’s stillness. Dan Light’s video projection is used to show the background changes in scenery and the ongoing missing person’s case in the press. The train graphics and motions are more reminiscent of a tube journey than a train journey. Louisa Lytton did the best she could as Rachel and the cast as a whole came together to offer up strong performances. Unfortunately, the material they were given meant that by the end of the performance I was left indifferent to the outcome and the final scenes bordered on farce.