Alys, Always: A superbly disquieting psychological thriller

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Television includes War and Peace, Sense and Sensibility, Fame is the Spur, Rumpole of the Bailey, Rebecca, Inspector Morse, Sherlock Holmes, Pride and Prejudice, The Forsyte Saga, Monarch of the Glen, He Knew He Was Right, Bleak House, A Touch of Frost, Miss Marple, Casualty, and most recently Death in Paradise, Downton Abbey, Man in an Orange Shirt, Agatha Raisin, Thanks for the Memories, The Boy with the Topknot and Delicious. Frances is a thirty-something sub-editor, an invisible production, drone on the books pages of the Questioner. Dance includes The Cellist for the Royal Ballet, plus new work with Wayne McGregor, Cathy Marston, Will Tuckett, Karole Armitage, Bern Ballet and Scottish Dance Theatre. Nicholas Hytner’s Bridge Theatre sometimes feels overwhelmed by a sense of unrealised potential: it can command the best playwrights, actors and directors in the world, but has yet to really knock it out of the park with a piece of new writing.

Her happy moments with Polly the airhead show the emptiness of contemporary celebrity, but you do wonder why we should care. Okay, these bits are quite funny, but they hardly compensate for the slack and rather pedestrian storytelling.That doesn’t happen here, and maybe the sense of her conspiracy with the audience slightly blunts the darker intent of the story. But then life - or fate - takes a turn, and driving home in the fog from her parents' country home she bears sole witness to a fatal car accident. Brilliantly crafted and sharply observed, this first novel with its sense of unease and apprehension holds your attention from the beginning to the end. Books editor Mary (Sylvestra Le Touzel), the doyenne of the arts desk, is the most fun to watch, but her jocular complaints about hot-desking and social media “traction” feel like calculated crowd-pleasers rather than organic wit.

At the heart of the plot is a secret that eventually comes out, although I had no sense of dramatic tension because it is not signposted clearly enough. At the National Theatre: Saint George and The Dragon, A Small Family Business, Great Britain (also West End), Timon of Athens, One Man, Two Guvnors (also West End, Broadway and international tour; Tony Award nominee and winner of Drama Desk Award for Best Score), Travelling Light, England People Very Nice, The Man of Mode, The Alchemist and Southwark Fair. There she meets: Laurence Kyte, still handsome in his fifties, Laurence's son, Teddy, who is in his twenties, and nineteen-year-old Polly, a rather needy drama student. The world of culture and privilege that the family inhabits seems within touching distance for Frances, if she can just play her cards right. All the stuff about the newspaper was excellent, and so was a lot of the dialogue (especially Polly's) and some of the observation.But the video screen that backgrounds the action, so we know when we’re outside or inside or in daytime or nighttime, is so often static and uninspired. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

To give a taster though, the narrator is Frances, the quiet, loner of a sub-editor at a publishing house. It's uneasy but intriguing reading thanks to the accurate illustration of her middle class characters. Frances, seems as you first read her words to be perfectly normal and then you realise by the little things she lets slip, her skewed views on things, and particularly by the way in which she studies the behaviour of everyone around her, calculating how best to win them over, what a sociopath she is. Harriet Lane’s cracking slow-burn of a psychological thriller has, since its publication in 2012, been crying out for stage and screen adaptation. Frances is a 30-something sub-editor, an invisible production drone on the books pages of the Questioner.

But the whole thing is woefully thin: not only is Frances unsympathetic, but what the piece has to say about creativity is banal, and the absence of tension, of subtlety and of conflict means that the story frequently slackens.