THE girl on the train is more off the train than on it; more off the booze than on it, despite being an alcoholic, in Rachel Wagstaff and Duncan Abel's new stage adaptation of Paula Hawkins' melodramatic potboiler.

Is this premiere off the rails or on the right track? Well, you have to judge it on its own merits, as a theatrical psychological drama, casting aside both the best-selling book, with its trio of narrators, and Tate Taylor's much-panned 2016 film, where Emily Blunt's Rachel was often on the train and always on the demon drink. It made little sense re-locating it to New York, beyond the lure of Hollywood finance.

Wagstaff and Abel restore the suburban-commuter English setting for Hawkins' story of Rachel Watson (Jill Halfpenny), the "unreliable witness", who has lost her job but still does the daily Euston commute. She has lost her husband Tom too (Adam Best, last seen in the National Theatre's Hedda Gabler tour) to Anna (Sarah Ovens) but still badgers him with drunken calls and visits to his new address. She is on the verge of losing her flat too, threatened with eviction.

The amateur sleuth, the voyeur, in Rachel has her looking out of the train window, spotting Tom's neighbour Megan Hipwell (Florence Hall) in a clinch with someone who is definitely not her husband (Theo Ogundipe). Megan ends up dead (hardly a spoiler alert), whereupon Rachel starts playing detective, yet given that she opens the play flat out, bruised and bloody, might she have had something to do with the murder? Enter D.I. Gaskill (Colin Tierney), slowly working his flat-footed way through the case.

Rachel now has the sole narrator's voice (rather than Tom and Anna as well), her malfunctioning mental state symbolised by the painting of a black hole in her flat. Nevertheless, there are still two more voices in this story of illusion and delusion, namely writers Wagstaff and Abel, who have decided to introduce shards of awkward humour that further distance the play from the book and film.

The "train" is omnipresent as Lily Arnold's smart set design takes the form of a white-lit carriage window, while sound designer Isobel Waller-Bridge and video designer Andrzej Goulding combine to create the sensation of trains rattling down the line, to convey the ever-rushing Rachel's fevered mind, although she sees things from the window in moments of stillness.

Joe Murphy's direction is as linear as a rail track, many scenes taking the narrow-tunnel form of confrontations between only two people that become repetitive for actors and audience alike, but do retain momentum. Rather than a wreck, Halfpenny's Rachel is more together than you might expect, though that doesn't mean you care a tuppence more about her, but while The Girl On The Train is more The Girl On A Different Train, it is not the train crash suggested in reviews elsewhere.

The Girl On The Train, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, until June 9. Box office: 0113 213 7700 or at wyp.org.uk