The Girl on the Train. Louth Playgoers, Riverhead Theatre, Louth. 05 October 2026.

There are some plays that invite you to sit back and watch. Others make you lean forward, listen more carefully and question almost everything you think you know. The Girl on the Train, currently playing at Louth’s Riverhead Theatre, belongs firmly in the second category.

Based on Paula Hawkins’ bestselling novel, this is a production built around uncertainty, memory and the uncomfortable realisation that the truth may be considerably more complicated than it first appears. Under the direction of first-time director Amanda Hodges, assisted by Derek Hodges, the production creates an atmosphere that is electric from the opening moments and rarely allows its audience to relax.

The story centres on Rachel Watson, played by Ellie Johnson, a woman whose daily train journey takes her past the houses she once knew so well. From her window she watches the lives of other people, particularly one apparently perfect couple whose relationship she has invested with a significance of her own. But Rachel's own life is far from perfect. Her marriage to Tom Watson (Darren Melton) has ended, her drinking has become a problem and her memories of recent events cannot always be trusted.

Then the seemingly perfect life she has been observing from the train is suddenly shattered.

From that point onwards, the production steadily tightens its grip. Rachel finds herself drawn into events that she may not fully understand, while Detective Inspector Gaskill (Gareth King) attempts to piece together what has happened. As Rachel's involvement increases, so does the question of whether she is a witness, a victim, an unreliable narrator – or something more complicated.

Ellie Johnson gives Rachel a compellingly disorientating presence. Her perpetual confusion is convincingly portrayed as she stumbles from one difficult situation to another, desperately attempting to establish what has happened and what she can actually remember. Johnson manages to make Rachel frustrating, vulnerable and sympathetic, sometimes within the same scene. It is a performance that encourages the audience to question Rachel's reliability while simultaneously wanting her to find her way through the maze.

Bailee Turrell is particularly magnetic as Megan Hipwell. Indeed, Turrell opens the entire production with a haunting rendition of the children's folk song and nursery rhyme One for Sorrow, immediately establishing an unsettling tone which lingers throughout the evening. There is something compelling about her presence, and she brings a fascinating mixture of confidence and vulnerability to Megan.

Leon Hennessey's Scott Hipwell provides another convincing and very human centre to the story. His reactions feel recognisable precisely because they are not easily categorised. Hennessey ensures that we do not overly sympathise with the grieving widower because of his brutish behavious. Darren Melton's Tom is similarly effective, avoiding the temptation to make him simply a convenient target for the audience's frustration as Rachel's ex-husband now settled with a new (stable) family after leaving Rachel. Both performances remind us that people rarely behave entirely rationally when confronted with jealousy, grief, fear and betrayal.

Nobody, however, escapes the audience's judgement. Gareth King's Detective Inspector Gaskill is often a step or two behind the dogged but increasingly confused Rachel. His investigation provides an important counterpoint to her increasingly subjective experience of events, while King's performance captures the frustrations of a detective trying to establish facts in a situation where the evidence refuses to behave itself.

Taya White's Anna Watson is a bundle of nervous energy, particularly in her encounters with Rachel. Terrified of her husband's ex-wife, Anna's reactions add another layer of tension to an already volatile situation. White conveys the paranoid dislike of her husband's ex-wife so effectively, by keeping her distance and physically manifesting her distrust in her body language.

Philip Marshall Junior completes the principal cast as Dr Kamal Abdic, bringing another intriguing presence into Rachel's increasingly tangled world. As a medical professional, Abdic oversteps the line and Marshall succeed in presenting the inner conflict experienced by the therapist, conscious that he must not betry doctor/patient confidentiality.

One of the production's great strengths is its technical design. The rear projection, supervised by Derek Smith, is used exceptionally well. Rather than becoming an all-encompassing backdrop, it is employed selectively, allowing particular moments, locations and changes of perspective to be emphasised without overwhelming the performers. It becomes part of the storytelling rather than merely decoration, and the restraint makes its impact all the greater.

That sense of restraint is important because The Girl on the Train is ultimately a story about perception. What we see is not necessarily what happened. What we remember may not be what we saw. And what we believe about other people can be shaped by assumptions that prove dangerously incomplete.

Amanda Hodges' first production as director shows a clear understanding of that principle. The pace is carefully maintained, the tension builds progressively and the audience is given just enough information to keep guessing without being allowed to settle on comfortable answers. The result is a production in which suspicion continually shifts from one character to another.

And that is precisely why the play works so well. By the latter stages, the audience is very much on the edge of its seat, trying to work out what is really happening while simultaneously wondering whether the conclusions it has reached can be trusted. The production succeeds because it makes us care about the people involved as well as the mystery surrounding them.

It would be a disservice to say much more about the plot. The Girl on the Train is a mystery best experienced without knowing where every piece of the puzzle will eventually fit.

What can be said is that Louth's Riverhead Theatre has a production here that deserves an audience. Atmospheric, tense and consistently engaging, it takes its audience on a journey where the destination matters – but so does the uncomfortable, sometimes unsettling journey taken to get there.

The Girl on the Train runs from Wednesday 7 to Saturday 10 October performances begin at 7:30pm and there are a strictly limited number of seats left for the show. Contact the Box Office for details.

Andy Evans - 6 October 2026