Put on a decent thriller and you will pack them in as surely as commuters pack the 6:15. So a gratifyingly full house was testimony to the pulling power of this old favourite.
Rachel Watson, divorced and lonely, envies the life of the seemingly perfect couple she sees from the window of her train every day. So when the wife disappears, she cannot resist involving herself in the mystery, especially as the pair live a few doors away from her ex-husband and his new family.
Laura Whitmore leads a spirited cast as a credibly brittle, needy Rachel, battling through an alcoholic haze to remember something she saw on the night of the disappearance. Samuel Collings plays a volcanic husband of Megan the missing woman, Edward Harrison bristles with resentfulness as Tom, Rachel’s ex, and Freya Parks has a sinewy, ethereal quality as Megan, with Daniel Burke her smoothie analyst.
Zena Carswell brings out the unexpected side of Tom’s new wife, and Paul McEwan hoves in as the necessary Inspector, roughly halfway between a plod and a Poirot.
I mention all the cast because they have to do all the heavy lifting, with little help from the set design. Three screens extend across the rear of the stage, behind which figures appear indistinctly as if through windows drizzled with rain.
As an image of indistinct memory, that works well; other aspects of the production less so. On an otherwise bare stage, Rachel’s flat is represented by an unmade bed on the floor, Megan’s by a drinks trolley, the analyst’s by a couple of chairs. There is no sense of claustrophobia, of the couple being spied upon in their own home, nor of the menace as Rachel spends time in the three locations, each time in the presence of a potential killer. And, fatally, the lighting goes beyond the stage to illuminate the sides of the auditorium, destroying any illusion of reality.
The show's UK and Ireland tour continues to Aberdeen, Leeds, Inverness, Mold, Southampton, Belfast, Cork and Dublin until Saturday 30 August 2025.