REVIEW: The Girl on the Train - the bones, but not the essence on stage
The Girl on the Train, Chichester Festival Theatre, until Saturday, March 1, based on the best-selling novel by Paula Hawkins and DreamWorks film, adapted by Rachel Wagstaff and Duncan Abel, directed by Loveday Ingram.
Paula Hawkins’ genuinely remarkable 2015 novel becomes a decent enough stage thriller in Rachel Wagstaff and Duncan Abel’s adaptation.
But for all the adaptation’s virtues, and there are plenty, it cannot possibly capture what made the novel so special. And nor does it particularly try to. Which really does leave you wondering what was the point.
With its changing perspectives, complex psychological shifting sands and extreme internalisation, the novel really was quite something – aspects for which tonight’s funky projections, eerie music, strange stylisations and backstage headlines can’t possibly be substitutes. We’re talking about things that the stage can’t achieve which again begs the question why adapt it. If you want The Girl On The Train, stay at home and read the book.
If you’re happy with the bones of it, but not the essence, then yes the stage adaptation is certainly a good night out with some fine acting particularly from Samuel Collings as Scott Hipwell and Natalie Dunne as Megan Hipwell.
At the centre of it all is Rachel Watson, tottering into drunkenness, always booze in hand but tormented by the elusive glimpses of something that she may or may not have seen - or is it just part of her obsession with a life from which she has been excluded?
Giovanna Fletcher gives a full-on and passionate performance in a monumental role. To take it to the next level, she certainly needs to tone down the shoutiness a notch or two. There is far more nuance to be had here. Even so there is much to admire in the way she commands the stage – even if plausibility is certainly stretched in her encounters with the policeman and the therapist, both far more inclined to confide in her than they really ought to be.
But then again we are in convoluted murky waters – a world where memory resists retrieval, the line between real and imagined is blurred and gaslighting starts to creep in. Jason Merrells is excellent as Rachel’s ex-husband Tom but maybe the night’s most haunting scene is Megan’s recollection of her own personal tragedy, superb from Dunne, as it all comes together much better in a superior second half. But The Girl On The Train it probably isn’t. We haven’t even got a train. And that matters if you know the book.
In the end, this is a night which rather than hinting at theatre’s infinite capacity suggests rather more its limitations.