When a play is adapted for the screen, the story is afforded a range of shiny new tools through which to express itself. Cinematographic framing, the power of special effects, and the comfort of multiple takes can all see a play given the means to blossom into something entirely new.
12 Angry Men was the terse blueprint; the grand visual pomp of Amadeus took it to boisterous new heights; and even Tom Stoppard’s sorely underrated film revision of his own Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead has its uniquely cinematic moments.
However, when this process is reversed, and a film is brought to the stage – as is the case for the Royal Exchange’s Let The Right One In, playing until 19 November – these tools are suddenly removed, and the language used to tell a story is stripped down to bare essentials. For many translations, this reduction is a far trickier affair, but when handled sensitively, it can result in something equally distinctive.
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Let The Right One In is a stage version of the 2008 Swedish film of the same name, which was itself adapted from John Ajvide Lindqvist’s 2004 novel. A modern classic coming of age / horror hybrid, it remains the high watermark of the same noughties vampire wave that brought you Twilight and True Blood – albeit more concerned with vampirism as a source of bodily anxiety than of shock and gore.
Indeed, where Let the Right One In might ostensibly be a play about a young boy who falls in love with a young girl who happens to be a vampire, underneath is a story about bodies, and both the damage and pleasure they incur. Throats are slit, necks are snapped, and faces are burned off with sulphuric acid, but equally important are the nervous energy of a first kiss, the tension of changing clothes in a school locker room, and the instinctual urges and shifts of puberty.
This bodily juxtaposition was true of the film too, and the comparison between unfamiliar adolescent physicality and the mythology of vampirism forms the core concern across screen and page alike. Live in the room, however, played out by actual bodies that hold actual weight, this retelling is able to focus in on the anatomical factor in a way that other mediums could not.
Whether it’s MacHale’s Oskar channeling his jittering outcast energy into a clumsy climbing frame dismount or Blundell’s Eli casually wrapping a bedsheet around herself in a rare moment of comfortable intimacy, each movement and motion holds a tangible importance. Even between scenes, when the cast assists in removing and adding stage infrastructure like the climbing frame atop which many of the play’s main conversations unfold, they remain physically engaged – locking the fixtures into the story before manoeuvring around them.
The play’s most brutal moments are deeply physical too, but it is these quieter and more intricate uses of the body that contain Let The Right One In ’s most valuable essence.
This bodily focus does not always work as intended, however. Several choreographed gym scenes featuring Oskar’s class serve only to break up the more interesting passages around them, and the rare moments in which we see Eli transform into something more feral and bloodthirsty feel mishandled.
Likewise, an intrusive 80s-inspired score that runs entirely too close to a Stranger Things tribute sees the play trying to be something it is not – a shame considering all the hard work that has gone into distinguishing this version as a story and theatrical experience in its own right, and not simply an adaptation.
In terms of pacing, the enigmatic first half is strongest, whilst the second descends into a frantic rush for the final scene and the big emotional payoff. Similarly, the brief excursion into Oscar’s father’s home brings little to the table, though Darren Kuppan deserves a shout for his excellent work giving four different bit-part characters a stronger presence than most.
This Let the Right One In is still Let The Right One In at heart – the uncomfortable connotations of ageless romance, the unsettling half-light of a dark winter city, and the sweetly nostalgic undertones of teenage enchantment are all here. But it is where this version departs, and attempts to carve space of its own with a vocabulary unique to the stage, that it really shines.
Film-to-stage adaptations can often run the risk of dampening or diminishing the resonance of source material, but overall writer Jack Thorne, director Bryony Shanahan and the cast have been careful to offer a fluent if sometimes stuttering translation.
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