REVIEW: The Girl on the Train, People's Theatre
Journey into the unknown
The theatre loves a train story (The Railway Children and Brief Encounter were both staged here quite recently) but don’t we all? It’s the world in microcosm thundering fleetingly through other worlds, other lives.
What a spur to the imagination, assuming (as one must these days) that the imagination is roaming free and not manacled to some technological ‘device’.
Paul Hawkins’s novel, with its brilliant title and premise, sold by the million after publication in 2015. The film, with Emily Blunt as the girl on the train, followed hot on its heels and a Hindi-language version came in its wake.
The stage adaptation by Rachel Wagstaff and Duncan Abel premiered professionally in Leeds in 2018, the North East’s Jill Halfpenny cast in the leading role of Rachel Watson.
And all of this I have managed to avoid, though not deliberately. It’s just one of those things.
Therefore, I came to director Sam Sanford’s People’s Theatre production knowing only that the story hinged on what a young woman saw from the train on her daily commute… and that she had what you might call issues.
And what a blessing! I didn’t know who did it, or ‘whodunit’ as they say in theatre. And since this is, for all its psychological overtones, essentially a whodunit, a mid-year treat for fans of the January ‘Agatha’, I was able to test my amateur sleuthing skills from the stalls.
No spoilers here… but what is there, you might ask, for the many – possibly the majority - who must know already whodunit because they’ve imbibed both book and film (perhaps both films if truly committed)?
Well, it’s another incredibly handsome People’s production. First class, actually.
I wonder, are the set designers in some kind of competition?
Stewart Dives gets the credit for this one and he’s certainly a contender because the tunnel affair which greets us – like a great skeletal ribcage – brilliantly evokes both the seedy underpass where a crime might be committed and Rachel’s mind when it enters its periodic fugue state.
Similarly, the use of gauze screens is devilishly clever, meaning remembered encounters and conversations can be manifested in real time, performed by actors behind a distancing haze rather than boringly related.
And then there are the performances.
Principally, there’s a stand-out turn by Kate Plass as a lissome Rachel, recently divorced from Tom, intensely lonely and burdened by a sense of failure, Tom’s new wife Anna having given him the baby she (Rachel) couldn’t.
Symbolising her predicament is the mattress centre stage, a bed Tracey Emin might once have considered quite tidy but soiled by the detritus of a frequently sozzled existence.
Plass has clearly embraced the role, whether ‘out of it’ (comatose on that bed) or frenetic, tortured by her sightings of the girl she comes to know as Megan (Lauren Urmson) and the final glimpse of her in what appears to be a compromising position.
Rachel gets sucked into a murder investigation led by stolid Detective Inspector Gaskill (Mark Buckley) who comments wryly on her “party for one” on seeing her singleton’s sleeping arrangement.
Is she victim or perpetrator? The story, choreographed with impressive movement throughout, twists and turns. Tom Watson (Sam Hinton) can’t seem to get Rachel out of his head or his life, to the consternation of Anna (Ellie-Brooke Adamson).
The same might be said of Rachel. But she also inveigles her way into the lives of Megan’s ex, Scott (Tom Kelly), and former therapist, Kamal Abdic (Callum Mawston).
Megan’s depressing story emerges in dribs and drabs but it’s Rachel you really feel for, battered by circumstance, desperate not to be doubted but often doubting herself.
And after all the tension and violence (this is not a tale for the faint-hearted) comes a sort of uplifting ending. And following that, on opening night, came a response - whoops and noisy applause - which speaks for itself.
The Girl on the Train runs until Saturday, July 18. Tickets from the People’s Theatre website.