THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS | UK TOUR @ FESTIVAL THEATRE, EDINBURGH
★★★
“Uncannily like Jodie Foster, Mollie Gallagher leads the company with confidence…”
AT two hours 15 minutes, including interval, this new stage adaptation of Thomas Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs more or less matches the movie version minute for minute (while omitting its most iconic line) – it feels longer, endless exposition ignoring rules to show, not tell.
Which is a shame, as the action plays out on Michael Taylor’s magnificent two level staging, an atmospheric canvas onto which lighting and projection designers Howard Hudson and George Reeve, respectively, add incredible, kinetic depth, creating a menacing world of peril and risk. Nikolai Foster’s fast-paced filmic approach to his direction only adds to serve the movie-like feel. Together, they create a multi-media feast for the senses.
Harris’s story, adapted for the stage by Gina Gionfriddo, finds trainee FBI agent Clarice Starling entrusted with a criminal profiling assignment that will change her life, and bring her face to face with psychologist and cannibal Dr Hannibal Lecter. Her aim, to get the jailed psychiatrist and cannibalistic serial killer to help identify Buffalo Bill, an active serial killer with a mother fixation and a macbre trademark – he skins his victims.
Warned not to let Lecter into her head, Starling soon finds herself engaged in a psychological battle, breaking the rules to engage with the serial killer in order to catch her prey before he kills again.
Best known for her role as Nina Lucas in Coronation Street, Mollie Gallagher makes an impressive professional stage debut as Starling. Sounding uncannily like Jodie Foster, she leads the company with assured confidence, ensuring the production is very much Clarice’s story.
The perceivable hush that falls over the audience with the arrival of John Partridge as Lecter is broken only by the unsettling, almost imperceptible rumble of sound designer Carolyn Downing and composer Grant Olding’s all-encompassing soundscape.
Confined for much of the play to a perspex cell, what Partridge may lack in the charisma and intensity of his predecessors in the role, he more than makes up for with his ominous, aloof demeanour along with the occasional roar of rage.
Sam Jackson’s Buffalo Bill is by far the more terrifying prospect; he paces, flits and floats through the action, an ever present and insidious threat. Despite the horrific nature of his actions, he manages to capture the warped innocence of the damaged child at the heart of his monstrous killer.
Good support comes from Oliver Farnworth as FBI Agent Jack Crawford and the supporting company who all put in strong performances, creating some chilling moments of dark, gruesome Grand Guignol along the way, including a particularly grisly cliffhanger to end Act One. You have been warned.
Full details and tickets HERE
