On the Right Track

THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN

Crescent Theatre, Birmingham, Saturday 25^th February 2023

Paula Hawkins’s best-selling novel is so effective because of its first person narrative, from the girl on the train herself.  She’s an unreliable narrator, so we’re never sure if what she says happened happened or whether it’s her booze-tinted imagination.  The stage adaptation by Duncan Abel & Rachel Wagstaff has to take a different approach as the Girl is revealed to be a fantasist, her story contradicting itself… A tough call for any actor taking on the role and here, Grace Cheadle rises to the challenge and nails it.  Her Rachel Watson is off-kilter, brittle and bitter, but also vulnerable and appealing.  We are with her all the way, happy to go along for the ride.

Briefly, the plot has Rachel commuting to work by train.  Her emotional life is a bit of a train wreck and so she self-medicates with day-drinking. Through the windows she sees people’s houses and fantasises about who they are and what they’re called.  One day, one of her regular characters is not there… A woman has gone missing and the police are involved.  Can Rachel’s unreliable evidence be of use or will she implicate herself?  To add to the mix, a couple of doors down from the missing woman’s home live Rachel’s ex-husband and his new wife and baby…and so a series of explosive scenes are set in train.

The multi-purpose set allows the action to zip along like an express train – we never have to wait for furniture to be shifted – and scenes are linked with video clips, extending the action beyond the set pieces: we see characters being taken in for questioning, for example, and there are clips of Rachel boozing on the train, to the distaste of other passengers.

The excellent central performance from Cheadle is supported by a strong ensemble.  Particularly effective is David Baldwin’s Detective Inspector Gaskill; Baldwin has a casual, natural style but still means business.  It’s a superb contrast with Cheadle’s more manic moments and self-doubt.  Tom Lowde, as Rachel’s ex, and Victoria Youster as new wife Anna are perfectly smug and annoying (from Rachel’s pov) while Oliver Jones captures the volatility of Scott, the missing woman’s husband.  Papa Yentumi’s therapist balances professional intonations with personal impulses, and Charlotte Thompson crops up repeatedly in flashbacks as the missing Megan, imbued with an almost saintly air (from Rachel’s pov) despite her bad behaviour.  Completing the cast is Susan Keats’s police officer, a small but crucial part well conveyed.

Director Rod Natkiel keeps the action fluid and clear.  The fast pace winds up the tension and the use of video flashbacks to display Rachel’s fractured memories works well.  It’s just when we reach the climactic, violent denouement that things go off the rails and get a bit muddy and unfocussed.  Perhaps the video screens could be used to augment the moment, seeing how they’ve been so integral to the rest of the production…

All in all, the production delivers the mystery, the tension, and the surprises of the story, and there’s plenty of humour to leaven the unpleasantness.  An involving thriller that doesn’t outstay its welcome. All aboard!

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Grace Cheadle and David Baldwin (Photo: Graeme Braidwood)

Skip to the Louvre

THE DA VINCI CODE

Grand Theatre, Wolverhampton, Tuesday 8^th March 2022

Dan Brown’s best-selling thriller, having already been a film starring Tom Hanks, now comes to the stage in this slick and stylised adaptation, with Nigel Harmon in the leading role as nerdy action hero and symbologist, Robert Langdon, who finds himself accused of murder when a body is found in the Louvre with the deceased’s handwriting naming Langdon, among a load of gobbledy-gook.  Langdon is an expert in gobbledy-gook and he teams up with the putatively French cryptologist, Sophie Neveu (Hannah Rose Caton).  With no further ado, we’re off on a treasure hunt, with puzzles to solve and codes to crack.

Luke Sheppard’s direction keeps the cast of ten on stage most of the time, involving them in the action, vocally and often physically, as well as making their individual appearances as characters Langdon and Neveu encounter along the way.  David Woodhead’s elegant set is dominated by Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man — you know the fellow, like Jim Morrison doing star jumps. Aided by Llyr Parri’s video and sound designs, the unfolding mystery is laid out before us.  There’s a lot to listen to, a lot to keep up with.

Nigel Harmon makes for a personable Robert Langdon: the geekish enthusiasm, the mansplaining, the claustrophobia, are all here, and he is ably supported by Hannah Rose Caton’s Sophie, who is also full to the brim with exposition.  Almost stealing the show is Red Dwarf’s Danny John-Jules as the eccentric Sir Leigh Teabing, clearly enjoying himself.

Alpha Kargbo’s Detective Fache charges around, shouting a lot, while Andrew Lewis is sympathetic as the murdered man, Sauniere (in flashbacks!).  Joshua Lacey is a decidedly menacing presence as the self-flagellating assassin Silas.

The plot cracks along at speed.  Rachel Wagstaff and Duncan Abel’s script could do with a couple of breathing spaces so we can digest each revelation, but thinking time is sacrificed in favour of pace.  Otherwise, it’s a faithful adaptation that translates well into action, performed by a strong ensemble who work like a well-oiled machine.

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Numbers up! Nigel Harmon as Robert Langdon. Photo:: Johan Persson

Ideas Above Her Station

THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN

Grand Theatre, Wolverhampton, Monday 18^th March, 2019

 

Paula Hawkins’s smash hit novel comes to the stage in this effective adaptation by Rachel Wagstaff and Duncan Abel.  Our protagonist is Rachel, a woman whose life has gone off the rails since her divorce from Tom.  She hits the bottle and commutes to London, her journey taking her past her former house.  She makes up lives for the people she sees, especially a young couple she calls Jess and Jason.  Except Jess is really Megan and Megan has gone missing… and Rachel has drink-induced gaps in her memory…

As ramshackle Rachel, Samantha Womack is superb, stumbling through the mystery like a drunken (and much younger) Miss Marple, conducting her own investigation just as the cops are investigating her.  Rachel is on stage throughout, so we only get to find out what she finds out.  Womack manages to arouse our sympathy for this broken woman and she is also rather funny.

Oliver Farnworth is also strong as Megan’s buff and bluff husband Scott, whose fits of rage make him a suspect.  John Dougall is highly enjoyable as Detective Inspector Gaskill, and there is a good supporting cast: namely, Naeem Hayat’s shady therapist Kamal, Adam Jackson-Smith as Rachel’s smarmy ex-husband Tom, and especially Lowenna Melrose as Tom’s second wife, Anna – her exchanges with Womack are bitter fun.  Kirsty Oswald comes and goes as missing Megan; she gets her moment in the spotlight, recounting the harrowing history of her baby in a particularly affecting scene.

Director Anthony Banks keeps the action fluid; the scene transitions run more smoothly than any rail service, with James Cotterill’s pieces of scenery sliding in and out and across, their motion bringing to mind railway carriages – or perhaps I’ve just been commuting too long myself.  Jack Knowles’s lighting and Andrzej Goulding’s projections suggest the passing trains as well as heightening moments of tension.  Banks brings all of these elements together to give us a taut, twisty thriller that retains the flavour of the book and improves on the film adaptation.

As well as a whodunnit, it’s a play about the abuse of women by men – but don’t let that put you off.  Compelling and intriguing, this touring production is well worth getting on board for.

Oliver Farnworth and Samantha Womack (Photo: Manuel Harlan)

Acts of War

BIRDSONG

Festival Theatre, Malvern, Monday 4^th March, 2013

 

Rachel Wagstaff’s stage adaptation of the Sebastian Faulks novel yields an intelligent and stirring production, making the point that the First World War is now only knowable to us through secondary sources.  The territory is familiar to us from poetry, literature and film.  R C Sheriff’s classic play Journey’s End springs immediately to mind, and also Blackadder Goes Forth with its depiction of men of all classes thrown together in the trenches.

Wagstaff’s script takes us back and forwards in time.  We begin in 1916 when the war is deeply entrenched (sorry) in France.  The men are cheery – given the title of the play, you might say ‘chirpy’ –  singing music hall songs and repeating well-worn patter to keep up their morale.  Enter cold fish of a commanding officer, Lieutenant Stephen Wraysford.  Distant and aloof, he has a habit of slicing rats open in order to read the future in their entrails.  He excuses a hard-working sapper from a court martial, setting in motion the chain of events that will bind these two men together until death does them part.

It is Wraysford’s story we follow back and forth from scene to scene.  Sent to France to work with a factory owner, he embarks on an affair with said factory owner’s wife, a holiday fling that increases in magnitude with the advent of war in Europe.

Sarah Jayne Dunn (Mandy off of Hollyoaks) is elegant and pained as the wife, struggling to keep a lid on her emotions. Malcolm James is imperious as her abusive husband –you can see why she’d stray.  The mood is leavened by Berard – Arthur Bostrom in fine fettle; inevitably, when he starts to speak in his French accent, you are reminded of his turn as the language-mangling gendarme in ‘Allo, ‘Allo! but this image soon fades.  Charlie G Hawkins is energetic and powerful as young recruit Tipper; his snivelling and sobbing from fear before the men go ‘over the top’ is heart-wrenching.

Victoria Spearing’s set – a bombed-out ruin of a building – serves for every scene: the trench, the home of Wraysford’s French hosts, the tunnels dug by the sappers.  The action flows from one to the next seamlessly as the cast bring on and take off chairs and tables and so on, flitting across the stage like ghosts in Wraysford’s memory, his past life in rubble and ruins.  This all works very well but I can’t help thinking I would like to see more differentiation in Wraysford himself.  You quickly acclimatise to the fact that he’s going to appear in his army uniform even in the pre-war scenes but Jonathan Smith, although indicating through physical attitudes the change of time, place and circumstance, could do with extending his range of vocal choices; it seems as though he addresses everyone in the aloof and strident tones of the officer he becomes, even the supposed love of his life.   I wanted to see more of a change in him on an emotional level.

As sapper Jack Firebrace, Tim Treloar provides the backbone of the show, playing the full gamut of emotions with truth and subtlety.  We feel the loss of his ailing son back home.  We sense his attachment to his trench-mate Arthur.  Through him we see what the war does to decent men.  Through Wraysford we see a man blighted by love rather than war – the war just compounds the damage done.  Unfortunately, he doesn’t quite match the presence of Firebrace.  More time is needed for us to invest in this man before we meet him as the cold and distant lieutenant.

Director Alastair Whatley has a powerful production on his hands.  There are some striking moments: the love-making scene has a whiff of contemporary dance to it, stylising the passion as we romanticise our own endeavours in that sphere!  The scenes in the tunnels and trenches with their bangs. booms and flashes are evocative and frightening.  The device of characters narrating their letters to and from home serves to give us multiple viewpoints of the situation and to individualise the people involved.

It’s a shame we feel more engaged with these minor, subsidiary characters than the leading man.