The Silence of the Lambs: a ‘thrilling’ on-stage rendition of hit film

John Partridge as Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs — ‘Electrifying’: John Partridge as Hannibal Lecter

(Image credit: Curve Theatre)

Given the recent fashion for screen-to-stage adaptations, it was perhaps only a matter of time before someone turned their attention to Jonathan Demme’s hit film The Silence of the Lambs (1991), said Nick Ferris in The Telegraph. Scripted by the American playwright Gina Gionfriddo, and directed by Nikolai Foster at the Leicester Curve, this new production is not a full-throttle success. But it’s a “surprisingly tasty treat” even so, which feels primed for commercial success.

Like the film, it conjures an “extraordinarily dark world”, making good use of scary prosthetics and video projections without veering into “gothic-camp”. John Partridge is convincing as Hannibal Lecter (though less menacing than Anthony Hopkins); and Mollie Gallagher makes a creditable stage debut as a Jodie Foster-like Clarice Starling. Yet the standout turn here is from Sam Jackson who, as the serial killer Buffalo Bill, brilliantly captures “the psychopathic ability” to switch fluidly “between the banal and the obscene”.

Strictly speaking, this is not an adaptation of the film but of Thomas Harris’ original novel, said Mark Lawson in The Guardian. However, it does successfully recreate the film’s uneasy mix of the “electrifying” and the horrific, and the story is staged in a way that feels cinematic, while maximising the live impact of the sometimes “rawly appalling” events. Gionfriddo, a “front-rank dramatist”, foregrounds the “pervasive sexism” of the 1983 setting, and gives Buffalo Bill’s female victims more plot-time and agency than either the film or the novel. Daringly, she also plays up the (“warped”) pseudo-romantic aspect of the Lecter-Starling relationship.

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I found the production most effective when it diverges from the film, said Holly O’Mahony in The Stage. For example, when Lecter breaks out of his chains here, it leads to a full-blown fight sequence which ends with him rising over his defeated opponent, “thrumming with excitement”. This is a “thrilling” moment. At other points, however, the show feels hampered by its efforts to recreate familiar visual motifs. Nevertheless, there is an “admirable ambition to presenting this grisly tale on stage for the first time, and plenty to make the squeamish baulk”.