If the final death knell ever sounds for regional theatre and someone writes an academic whodunnit, they should cite in part-evidence this criminally bad stage adaptation of ’s international best-seller.

Given the millions who have devoured The Girl on the Train (a runaway success as soon as it appeared in 2015) it makes crude commercial sense to serve up a theatrical spin-off. Yet Rachel Wagstaff and Duncan Abel’s version is as appealing as a British Rail sandwich: it has the capacity to get up the noses of the novel’s fans and may leave such a rancid aftertaste it might put people off theatre for good.

was a disappointment (albeit box-office success) for a number of reasons, but the most obvious one was the bungled sense of place. It relocated the action to the prosperous suburbs of New York, and made the characters fashion-shoot glamorous, whereas the book’s allure lies in its could-happen-to-anyone, rather English ordinariness.

An unhappy woman, Rachel – reeling from a failed marriage and regularly bound for drunken oblivion as she shuttles pointlessly between a fictional Buckinghamshire satellite town and Euston station – becomes fixated with the backs-of-houses goings-on in the street where she once lived.

Hawkins’s simple but effective prose luxuriates in the collision between public space and private interior world, the aching gulf between past and present, the blur between actuality and what Rachel, the heroine, thinks is happening.

Rachel becomes preoccupied with the mysterious Megan Credit: Richard Davenport/The Other Richard

Fleetingly glimpsed external locations become inseparable from internal turmoil. The prime object of her unreliable, reverie-embellished fascination – Megan, who lives a few doors down from Anna (the woman who stole her husband, “took” her life), goes missing, is found dead; who’s to say that Rachel, with her black-outs and mysterious bruises, isn’t the culprit? What grips the reader is that they must turn sleuth (as she does), sift and evaluate; even if the big “twist” doesn’t fully convince, the suspenseful mood, the psychological tease of it, carries you along.

Here, though, inertia is the word. Wagstaff and Abel have rejected the most obvious and faithful route into the story, preserving the book’s three interwoven “monologues”, opting instead for straightforward exchanges jolting into flashbacks. They’ve hacked away the description, voyeuristic and self-scrutinising, that gives the writing its lyrical lilt – saving only a bare sprig for the end.

The set design evokes the claustrophobia of a train carriage Credit: Richard Davenport/The Other Richard

Aside from a lighting effect that creates a sense of whizzing carriages (at variance with the crucial slowing-down that informs the plot), we’re confined to the same drab multi-purpose interior (styled by designer Lily Arnold like an elongated compartment) dominated by a grim work of art (Megan’s) that rams home a “black hole” motif.

“That’s an hour of my life I’ll never get back” a man near me grumbled at the interval. But spare a thought for the cast – led by Jill Halfpenny’s far-too-composed Rachel – condemned to reprise scene after awkwardly positioned scene (Joe Murphy directs), delivering dialogue that might have jumped tracks from a TV police procedural. Don’t say you weren’t warned: on all points, failure.

Until June 9. Tickets: 0113 213 7700; wyp.org.uk