The Girl On The Train (West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds)

Verdict: Colourlessly efficient ★★✩✩✩

SOME 20 million people have bought Paula Hawkins’s psychological thriller since it was published in 2015, and many more will have seen the film starring Emily Blunt.

But a stage thriller needs to offer more character substance if it’s to avoid feeling like a formulaic melodrama. And although Joe Murphy’s new production is sincerely acted and neatly staged, the cardboard characters in Rachel Wagstaff and Duncan Abel’s adaptation aren’t sufficiently complex to involve us.

Jill Halfpenny, as boozy heroine Rachel, is a model of frumpy, bunnyboiling instability. With a raw scar on her forehead, sagging clothes and a bottle of plonk, she has the look of a homeless street casualty.

Yet for all her emotional entanglements and memory loss we never really doubt her testimony. Through no fault of the hard-working actors, almost everyone else around her is a cardboard cut-out, spouting cliches.

And although Murphy’s tidy direction cleverly allows different scenes to pass through one another in the criss-crossing plot, it all feels increasingly mechanical.