Tone is a tricky element to handle in any creative endeavour. It’s impossible to define in a quantitative sense, but you know if you’ve hit the mark or not. With the Darlinghurst Theatre Company’s production of Let the Right One In, it’s safe to say that if the audience is frequently fizzing with laughter at what is ostensibly a bleak and transgressive horror story about the relationship between a 12-year-old boy and a centuries-old vampire in the body of a child, the aim is off by a considerable margin.
It’s not down to one factor, but a combination of things. At least we can’t blame the pedigree.
Adapted by Jack Thorne (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child) from the novel by Swedish author John Ajvide Lindqvist, which has also spawned two movies and a new television series, Let the Right One In is directed by Alexander Berlage, who mounted American Psycho at the Sydney Opera House last year.
It boasts impressive central performances from Heartbreak High’s Will McDonald as the bullied Oskar and especially Sebrina Thornton-Walker (Three Winters Green for Lambert House Enterprises and Les Solomon) as Eli, the vampire who befriends and/or seduces him, depending on your reading of the material.
Thornton-Walker is fantastic as Eli, her physicality and demeanour managing to evoke an unsettling mix of child-like innocence, playful seductiveness, loneliness and danger. There are striking, stark moments of horror that see her streaked in blood or gliding ethereally through a fog bank. As a trans woman, Thornton-Walker’s casting is also particularly provocative here. Although only alluded to in most adaptations, in the source novel Eli was a boy, Elias, in mortal life, but identifies as female as a vampire.
But those moments stand out all the more when contrasted against drama that often fails to land. We can presume that farce was not the intention, but scenes that on the page and the screen were redolent with pathos drew near-constant laughter here. Perhaps it was nervous laughter; confronted with themes of pedophilia (Eli has an adult servant/protector, Hakan, played by Stephen Anderton, whose desires are repulsive) and deliberately murky motivations on the part of Eli, discomfort can trigger a laugh reaction. Add to that the occasionally shaky Swedish accents sported by the cast, plus the simple fact that watching young adults play children requires a certain amount of buy-in on the part of the viewer, and the emotional intent of the work is lost.
Set and costume designer Isabel Hudson does fine work, the stark stage looking like nothing so much as a modern industrial slaughterhouse hosed clean of blood, but a central column blocked key action for some audience members (including this reviewer).
Composer James Peter Brown and sound designer Daniel Herten give us a suitably unsettling soundscape, and harsh lighting by Trent Suidgeest suggests the bleak universe in which this supernatural drama plays out.
If you’re after some horror outside of the cinema this Halloween season, this could be your supernatural fix. If you’re really keen on queer vampiric romances with plenty of tense subtext for you to dissect over a vino in the foyer bar afterwards, this will probably tick some boxes for you too. And yet, for this devoted fan of the source material at least, none of it comes together in an emotionally satisfying way, and this iteration of Let the Right One In is considerably less than the sum of its parts. Perhaps ditch the accents next time.
Let The Right One In plays at the Eternity Playhouse in Darlinghurst until Nov 20, 2022. Find out more about the show here.
