Theatre reviews: The Silence Of The Lambs | Transparent

The Silence Of The Lambs, Festival Thetare, Edinburgh ★★★★

Transparent, Oran Mor, Glasgow ★★★

Thomas Harris’s 1988 novel The Silence of the Lambs, so we’re told, is a story that tackles profound themes of trauma and healing, and of sexism, patriarchy and class in American society. It also features two contrasting serial killers, in an exploration of the nature of violent criminality; and all these themes are of course vividly captured in Jonathan Demme’s Oscar-winning 1991 film.

It’s debatable, though, whether any of this really accounts for the story’s popularity with readers and audiences, which seems largely based on on its sheer shock value, and on that unforgettable film image of Anthony Hopkins with his jaws wired together, so fierce is jailed killer Hannibal Lecter’s cannibalistic impulse to kill and devour other human beings. And Gina Gianfreddo’s new stage version - premiered in Leicester last month, and now in Scotland at the start of a long UK tour - certainly plays up to the novel’s credentials as a horror story, often plunging us into terrifying darkness between scenes, and building an immense sense of menace around the central performance as Lecter of Eastenders and Masterchef star Jonathan Partridge.

As the first adaptation of the story written by a woman, though, Gianfreddo’s version also gives plenty of space to Mollie Gallagher in the Jodie Foster role of trainee FBI investigator Clarice Starling. Physically small, and emotionally damaged by her tough upbringing, Clarice is nonetheless an astonishingly resolute and courageous figure, determined to prevent current serial killer “Buffalo Bill” from torturing and slaying any more women; and it’s Clarice’s story - her struggles against the shocking 1980s sexism of her male colleagues, her painful personal backstory, her willingness to risk opening up to Lecter in return for his knowledge of this new killer - that gives Gianfreddo’s version its real dramatic backbone.

Nikolai Foster’s staging of the show - with a cast of 11, and an impressive prison-like metal set by Michael Taylor - is unfailingly striking and spectacular; Partridge’s presence is broodingly athletic and graceful, and all the more sinister for it. And if the show’s emphasis on Clarice’s inner journey makes its inconclusive ending - with its hint of her now unbreakable bond with Lecter - uniquely disturbing, then that seems fair enough; in this complex story about human strength and weakness, and how each can sometimes beget the other, in strange and troubling ways.

At Oran Mor in Glasgow, meanwhile, the new Play, Pie And Pint season continues with LC Stephens’s Transparent, a brief three-handed drama that takes a more kindly - if still sharp-eyed - view of human frailty. Set on the doorstep of Oran Mor, in Glasgow’s West End, the play tells the tale of Barry and Clare, two middle-aged people who have begun to wonder whether they really exist at all any more.

He is 61, divorced, hardly even able to support his grown-up son through a frightening health scare involving his girlfriend’s pregnancy; she is 51, single, and still in shock following the recent death of her beloved brother, her only family. And over what is sometimes a slightly slow-moving hour, after a chance meeting in a pub they gradually succeed in finding one another - even though he is so invisible that she has clean forgotten a date they had a year ago, after meeting at a book group.

If the storytelling sometimes lacks pace, though, Graham McLaren’s production revels in two beautiful central performances from Jo Freer and Tom McGovern. And if the story’s three background characters - Clare’s brother Vic, her horrible would-be boyfriend Jack, and Barry’s pal Spider - need a little more visual differentiation to work to the maximum, Keith Macpherson still offers heroic support in all three roles; bringing home a Byres Road story that lights no fireworks, but offers some telling and compassionate truths about the tough inner battles being fought by everyone we meet - particularly after we reach a certain age.

Both shows run until 12 September.

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