The Silence of the Lambs - This stage adaptation gets under your skin

★★★★★

Curve is bathed in red light, audience members are drinking red wine, though I can't be certain it is Chianti, and the shadows of moths settle on the walls. There is great anticipation ahead of the world premiere of The Silence of the Lambs.

Photo by Marc Brenner

Young and plucky FBI agent Clarice Starling is enlisted to persuade a cannibalistic killer to share his forensic psychiatrist skills to help identify a new serial killer known only as Buffalo Bill. The two, however, strike up a co-dependent and unsettling relationship, forced to reveal their innermost thoughts "quid pro quo".

Mollie Gallagher plays the pint-sized detective, holding her nerve and commanding the lengthy scenes, opposite seasoned stage veteran John Partridge as the infamous Lecter. He's menacing, and oddly charming and suave. It's pretty easy to fall victim to his charm.

When the pair meet- he confined to his glass cell, she pacing outside it - you can hear your own heartbeat. Carolyn Downing's excellent sound design plays in 360 stereo, mixing era-defining tunes (there is a somewhat ironic use of "Girls Just Want To Have Fun") with that haunting fluttering of wings. This isn't a horror that relies on cheap scares or shocks. It's clever. Drawing on brilliant source material, the production pulses with terror and is delivered by a cast at the top of their game.

Designer Michael Taylor plays with perspective and depth, the set creating long, foreboding prison corridors, and using the height of the cage. Behind each door hides a new horror left to the imagination with threatening lighting (by Howard Hudson). Gina Gionfriddo has done punchy work adapting Thomas Harris' novel for the stage. It's pacey under Nikolai Foster's direction, which often involves two timelines unfolding at once - Bill (played with unsettling childlike wonder by Sam Jackson) prowls, gleefully showing off his coat of skins while a woman cries for her life, and interrogation continues.

My single gripe is that Clarice, despite dominating both the narrative and the stage, is denied her arc. We do not see her pitching her motive, to reopen the cases of murdered women, to the senator, and her showdown unfolds in a blackout, shadowing the glory of her actions. She is still reduced to being a love interest. Yet, there are moving moments.

As Jame, Jackson sits cross-legged in blue underpants, awestruck watching black-and-white videos of his beauty pageant mother (projection by George Reeve), whose gaze becomes entwined with her son's crimes against women. The victims are well-written, respected.

Partridge performs mostly from the isolation of the glass box, holding intense eye contact, flicking his vision from his subject to a daze. Doll-like. It's suitably creepy, while the props- a dismembered head, a skinned "floater"- are as intriguing as they are grotesque. Meanwhile, the brutality and violence are visceral, with movement by Dale White.

You can't bleat it!