The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins & Dreamworks Film, adapted by Rachel Wagstaff & Duncan Abel.
Mockingbird Theatre at Belconnen Arts Centre, Canberra, August 5 – 22 2026
Reviewed by Frank McKone
Aug 15
Cast
Rachel Watson – Morgan HeathWilliams; Tom Watson – Robert Weardon
Scott Hipwell – Timothy Cusack; Megan Hipwell – Susie Todd
Kamal Abdic – Ankush Singh Khanchi
Detective Inspector Gaskill – Paul Sweeney
Anna Watson – Sabrina Fu
Production Team
Director/Designer – Chris Baldock
Assistant Director – Dale Rheynolds
Stage Manager and Tech Operator – Aoife McFoley
Lighting Design – Rhiley Winnett and Chris Baldock
Projections and Video Design – Chris Baldock
Sound and Music Design – Chris Baldock
Costumes and Props – Chris Baldock, Dale Rheynolds and the cast
Intimacy Consultant – Steph Evans
The purpose of the best theatre is never merely to entertain, but, in doing so, it is to engage us in better understanding of ourselves, individually and as members of society.
The seemingly ironically named Mockingbird Theatre’s choice of the theme of domestic violence is vindicated this very morning as I write, by John Hanscombe’s The Echidna article, Sunday August 16 2026, in The Canberra Times: “A number that shames us all”.
“So far this year – and this number will in all likelihood be out of date by the time you read it – 30 women have been killed, according to the Counting Dead Women Australia register, too often by men known to them. Partners, husbands, sons.”
Chris Baldock’s directing and design of this stage adaptation of the Paula Hawkins novel, and the quality of realism he achieves with his excellent team of actors, makes this production of The Girl on the Train essential viewing. Only the very ending scene is questionable, as I see it, from a drama point of view.
The original novel raises a question of its scientific veracity, and a source such as the University of Warsaw : Tetiana Grebeniuk. Narrative Unreliability in Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train as a Strategy of Reader Immersion supports the science and says about reading the novel –
“Attention is focused on two components of reader gratification as manifest in Hawkins’ novel: intellectual satisfaction due to the solution of the murder mystery (temporal immersion), as well as satisfaction resulting from the protagonist’s psychic recovery and revenge (emotional immersion)”.
https://www.researchgate.net/4050_Tetiana_Grebeniuk
Morgan Heath Williams is remarkable in creating an entirely realistic characterisation of that protagonist, Rachel Watson, described in Google AI as exhibiting –
Reality invalidation: The antagonist exploits Rachel's self-doubt and drinking habits to make her believe she caused her own blackouts and violent behavior.
Self-gaslighting: Victims under prolonged abuse often internalize blame, convincing themselves their own perceptions are entirely untrustworthy.
Coercive control: The dynamic isolates the victim emotionally, creating total reliance on the abuser's version of events.
That antagonist is Tom Watson, played eerily by Robert Wearden as the least likely to be the murderer until finally found out by his ex-wife Rachel’s determination to find the truth.
The search for the truth makes the play something like a Sophocles tragedy – mythical but essential for understanding why such things happen. On this point, in the ending scene, when Tom takes the child, his child, onto the railway track, I – and my wife – felt the tragedy would have reached its ultimate awfulness if the child had not been retrieved just in time, and had been killed by the train with him, in what could be seen as Tom’s suicide.
Of course, it was still not exactly a happy ending, if you imagine that baby growing up; but that ending softened, perhaps weakened, the dramatic effect – compared, I think, with the numbers reported in John Hanscombe’s article.
For example, Rosie Batty’s story, of her husband’s killing of their son Luke, and his threatening and then being killed by police, and her becoming a prominent domestic violence campaigner and being named the 2015 Australian of the Year, takes us from fiction to fact. And gives Mockingbird’s The Girl on the Train all the justification it needs for its presentation today.
Not to be missed – and hopefully for an extended season or even tour, considering that a strength of the production is its in-the-round intimacy for a necessarily quite small audience. Less is more, I suggest.
