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Let the Right One In (play)

Jack Thorne interview: 'Christmas is a dark time as well as a happy time'

The writer behind 'Let the Right One In' explains why teenagers associate so closely with vampires

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Co-writer of Shane Meadows’s ‘This Is England’ TV series and creator of cult BBC3 horror ‘The Fades’, writer Jack Thorne’s latest play is a stage version of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s vampire novel ‘Let the Right One In’. Directed by John Tiffany (‘Once’, ‘Black Watch’), it’s about Oscar, a lonely young boy who meets Eli, a girl much older than she seems.

You don’t get many plays about vampires – why did you think you could pull one off?
‘It was like one of those massive trust exercises: John Tiffany said to me, “Don’t worry about how it’s going to look on stage, just write the story as you see the story.” I’d been a fan of his for so long that I knew he’d know how to do it – and he did.’

Are the two hit film versions of ‘Let the Right One In’ a distraction?

‘You don’t worry how close it is to a thing that happened before, you just worry about telling the story well, in your own way. So this is set in Dundee, and the way John and Steven [Hoggett, choreographer] have staged it is like nothing you could see on film – Steven created these incredible dance moments that intersperse the action.’
There are special £10 tickets for teenagers – is this a story for teens?
‘It’s about teenagers and about a specific memory of being teenage. I think the reason why vampires are in with young adults at the moment is that it’s harder being a teenager now than it was for us – we didn’t grow up with the internet like they did, our job prospects were better, that sort of thing. It’s a bit more of a brutal world for kids these days and that’s why they like things like this and “The Hunger Games”− because they’ve got bigger things to worry about than we did and this helps them talk about big things.’

Will people be frightened by it?
‘I think Eli is scary – she’s not somebody I’d want to meet on a dark night walking through the streets of Dundee. But the main reaction we’ve had is that people feel it’s a kind of love story. But is it frightening, some of it is quite horrific to watch.’

Does it tickle you that it’s running in the Royal Court’s Christmas slot?
‘I think that’s ace. My first professional production was a show called “When You Kill Me” at the Bush in this December slot. It was a show about a girl paralysed from the waist down because she’s just been raped. And that did all right. It’s a dark time as well as a happy time, Christmas, it’s a time when I think a lot of people are quite lonely. Oscar’s quite a lonely dude, so this is that sort of Christmas show.’

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