This is The Portrait of a Lady – the novelist’s 1881 masterpiece about Americans on the Grand Tour – but it’s as if Nicki Frei’s new adaptation has been penned in mirror writing. If James envisaged Isabel going to “affront her destiny” in Europe, what was the tomboyish kid-sister of Nocturne’s narrator doing when she stepped out of their front garden in Illinois, straight under the wheels of his Buick Electra? With indirect allusions to Greek tragedy, the narrator then proceeds to chart the repercussions down the next 15 years, including the mental disintegration of his staid parents. When the narrator’s father points a gun in his face, he describes its muzzle, “the hole like a little iron nostril”, and then the feel of the cylinder in his mouth, “like kissing the engine of a toy train”. And Wink the Other Eye promises to whirl you back to Wilton’s heyday when the reeling comedian Champagne Charlie was making his name here, the stage was awash with high-kicking bloomers and 1,500 locals regularly crammed in to sing along.

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