The Girl on the Train
Everyman, Cork
★★★★★
The episodic structure of this stage retelling of Paula Hawkins’s bestselling novel is a challenge overcome by a brightly sustained performance from Laura Whitmore as the eponymous girl on the train. Challenge is not a casual word: her role as Rachel Watson keeps her on stage and dominant in almost every scene.
Movement is the theme throughout as Rachel Wagstaff and Duncan Abel, the play’s writers, re-create the atmosphere of railways and station platforms and huddled, hurried passengers that Hawkins evoked in her book. There is never a moment, it seems, in which something is not happening; there is no sense that the train doesn’t stop here any more.
Certainly not Rachel Watson’s train, from which she watches, like a wistful voyeur, the lives of others. A soul close to being lost, she ostensibly makes her journeys as a commuter, but as the narrative develops it is suggested that she is not a traveller but a spy, seeking out evidence of other lives in order to verify her own.
In her currently chaotic existence she seeks certainties to confirm her observations of events fleeting past her window seat. But what she sees are the backs of houses, not the facades of places she knows, or thinks she knows, and not the inner lives of the people who live there. And anyway, Rachel asks all the wrong questions even as she herself is interrogated.
READ MORE
In this Melting Pot production, as in Hawkins’s novel, there is an underlay of irony, allowing glimpses of humour for an enthralled audience. From the start, Loveday Ingram’s direction offers subtle plot indications, such as the abandon with which Rachel uncorks a bottle and then shoves it into its pillowed hiding place; the flourish with which she repeatedly drapes herself in a coat as challenging as a chevalier’s cloak; the gilded seconds in which a suspicious kiss is framed as if recalling FW Burton’s painting The Meeting on the Turret Stairs; and, above all, the monologue by Freya Parks as Megan, one of the most memorable moments in a play that essentially is about memory.
As in any decent thriller – and this is certainly one of those – the core of the plot is truth. You can add to this the issues of personal responsibility, fidelity, interpretation and besotted, despairing conviction. There is also institutional doubt, expressed by Paul McEwan’s detective, a dogged inspector who calls rather too often.
The composition of set design by Adam Wiltshire, sound by Elizabeth Purnell and video design by Dan Light succeeds in establishing the acceleration of confliction, generating an energy in which Rachel herself is energetically adrift.
One caveat: light script editing might eliminate the repeated assurances of the strong cast that they have something to tell one another. And another: Whitmore’s voice initially seems too frail, almost adolescent, to carry the weight of Rachel’s experiences. But it matures as girl becomes woman.
The Girl on the Train is at the Everyman, Cork, until Saturday, August 23rd, then at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, Dublin, from Tuesday, August 26th, until Saturday, August 30th
