Vampire romance casts magic spell onstage

We spent much of our recent London holiday taking trips to the countryside and watching theater shows. We skipped two of the 20 shows we had prebooked because we wanted to see Stonehenge’s 5,000-year-old megaliths located 140 km outside central London, as well as the ancient Roman baths of Somerset some 15 kms further.

But, we couldn’t wait to get back to the city to see if playwright Jack Thorne and Tony-winning director John Tiffany (“Once”) could pull off the tricky jump from screen to stage of Tomas Alfredson’s 2008 Swedish horror-romance, “Let The Right One In,” and its Hollywood reboot, “Let Me In,” starring Chloe Grace Moretz.

The cult favorite is considered one of the horror genre’s best—and creepiest! Could Tiffany compress its sprawling story into something that would fit the Apollo Theatre’s 113-year-old proscenium stage?

Set in the snow-covered Dundee woods in the ’80s, this gorgeously designed gothic tale of romance and retribution is by turns tender and terrifying as it follows the relationship that develops between lonely 12-year-old Oskar (Martin Quinn) and Eli (Rebecca Benson), the pale-skinned, perpetually hungry girl he meets on a deserted playground.

BENSON. Discovers love for the first time.

True nature

The coming-of-age story becomes more riveting as the protagonists’ friendship blossoms into romance. It doesn’t take long before Oskar discovers the true nature of Eli (yes, she’s a vampire), who comes to his rescue when school bullies brutally beat him up and throw him into a swimming pool (cleverly realized by designer Christine Jones).

Meanwhile, the residents of their community are beginning to get unnerved by reports that an elusive serial killer is on the prowl for human flesh and blood!

You won’t hear Oskar, Eli and her victims burst into song, but Tiffany’s production inventively utilizes eerie, ambient music (by Olafor Arnalds) and site-specific choreography (by Justin Martin and Vicki Manderson) to chillingly convey the mood in each scene.

In one sequence, you’ll see the limber cast climbing up and down trees to stylistically dramatize the deadly chase between predators and their prey—in another scene, Oskar dances his growing rage as snowflakes fall all over the trees around him!

In the muted chaos of his world, beauty and danger snugly sit side by side as Oskar and Eli discover love for the first time.

It was a conscious decision for Thorne to set the story in the ’80s. He explains, “That particular era felt like a time when people were coming to grips with what they wanted the world to be. It was transitional,” he told journalist Sarah Dobbs. “The movement makes it feel more like a fairy tale—and it takes you inside the characters’ heads.”

Approach

Tiffany shares, “Jack is a self-confessed expert on nerdy boys who are bullied. We needed to address the play as Samuel Beckett would approach a horror story. Yes, it’s about a vampire, but it isn’t only about that—it’s a love story about someone who won’t ever grow old and someone who will.

“To create tension, we wanted to do the swimming pool scene for real. You can see the audience thinking, ‘He’s been under there too long!’ Some people found it unbearable, but we built Martin up to that moment—we had a lifeguard train him, and we had him take scuba diving lessons.”

“Interestingly, theatergoers find the bullying sequences more uncomfortable to watch than Eli’s killing scenes—because bullying is entirely manmade! We decided to do just two or three bloody scenes and do them well. We didn’t want to have a gore fest and turn this play into a Tarantino version of the movie!”