Novel’s adaptation hits the buffers
The Girl on the Train West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds ★★★★★
If the final death knell ever sounds for regional theatre and someone writes an academic whodunit, they should cite in part-evidence this criminally bad stage adaptation of Paula Hawkins’s global bestseller.
Given the millions who have devoured The Girl on the Train (a runaway success as soon as it appeared in 2015) it makes crude commercial sense to serve up a theatrical spin-off. Yet Rachel Wagstaff and Duncan Abel’s version is as appealing as a British Rail sandwich: it will likely get up the noses of the novel’s fans, and may leave such a rancid aftertaste it might put people off theatre for good.
The 2016 film was a disappointment (albeit box office success) for a number of reasons, but the most obvious one was the bungled sense of place. It relocated the action to New York and made the characters glamorous, yet the book’s allure lies in its rather English ordinariness. Rachel – reeling from a failed marriage and regularly bound for drunken oblivion as she shuttles pointlessly between a fictional Buckinghamshire satellite town and Euston station – becomes fixated with the backs-of-houses goings-on in the street where she once lived.
Hawkins’s simple but effective prose luxuriates in the collision between public space and private interior world, the gulf between past and present, the blur between actuality and what Rachel thinks is happening.
Fleeting external locations become inseparable from internal turmoil. The prime object of her unreliable, reverie-embellished fascination is Megan, who lives a few doors down from Anna (the woman who stole Rachel’s husband and “took” her life). Megan is found dead; who’s to say that Rachel, with her black-outs and mysterious bruises, isn’t the culprit? What grips the reader is that they must turn sleuth (as she does); and even if the big “twist” doesn’t fully convince, the suspenseful mood, the psychological tease, carries you along.
Here, though, inertia is the word. Wagstaff and Abel have rejected the most obvious and faithful route into the story, preserving the book’s three interwoven “monologues”, opting instead for straightforward exchanges jolting into flashbacks. They’ve hacked away the description, voyeuristic and self-scrutinising, that gives the writing its lyrical lilt – saving only a bare sprig for the end. Aside from a lighting effect that creates a sense of whizzing carriages (at variance with the crucial slowing-down that informs the plot), we’re confined to the same drab interior (styled by designer Lily Arnold like an elongated compartment) dominated by a grim artwork (Megan’s) that rams home a “black hole” motif.
“That’s an hour of my life I’ll never get back,” a man near me grumbled at the interval. But spare a thought for the cast – led by Jill Halfpenny’s far-too-composed Rachel – condemned to reprise scene after awkward scene (Joe Murphy directs), delivering dialogue that might have jumped tracks from a TV police procedural. Don’t say you weren’t warned: on all points, failure.
Until June 9. Tickets: 0113 213 7700; wyp.org.uk