When you think about it, within the story of The Silence of the Lambs, grotesque as it is, both serial killer’s Hannibal Lecter and Buffalo Bill are successful in implementing the ‘nose to tail’ concept of consumption. One eats people, the other wears them, as accomplices they may never have been found. Apart – Lecter has a hand in the imprisonment of Gumb and Gumb indirectly enables Lecter to break free.
I’m going to say this, and then I’m going to move on from both film and book to talk about this production on its own merits – in this stage version, Buffalo Bill’s ambitions appeared less about wanting a full woman suit, and more about making a nice dust jacket with matching face-mask accessory. If Buffalo Bill were on Project Runway, Law Roach might have had something to say about those unfinished seams.
So, moving away from the original book by Thomas Harris and the film adaption by Jonathan Demme, I’m going to talk solely about this production adapted by Gina Gionfriddo, directed by Nikolai Foster with set design by Michael Taylor. As theatre, it is a raw, furious and highly emotional story about a serial killer at large in the 1980’s and the young FBI trainee trying to find him.
Mollie Gallagher carries Clarice Starling strongly. Clarice must negotiate the tortuous gap between learning the ropes at the FBI and extracting information from convicted serial killer Hannibal Lecter played vivaciously by John Partridge. Lecter acts as an oracle for the darkest corners of the human mind. At the same time, more is revealed about Buffalo Bill’s victims (alias for the character we discover is called Jame Gumb) played by Sam Jackson. As we get closer to seeing the disgusting nature of his crimes, with the moth – transformation made flesh – becoming the final key that leads Clarice into a deadly confrontation with Gumb, she also rescues the final damsel in distress – Catherine Martin who is played carefully on the knife edge of despair and dark humour by Lottie Amor.
For me, the story is very much about size: physical size, appetite, ambition and stature with the added minimising of women’s stature and the obvious danger and insidious nature of that. Gallagher’s Clarice looks vulnerable to those who underestimate her but is intellectually formidable and highly physically trained to defend herself. There are some interesting moments of that tension throughout.
Oddly though, there wasn’t all that much made of Hannibal actually being a cannibal which…hello?! I said I wouldn’t talk about the original but come one, Harris didn’t make that rhyme for nothing.
The production itself is high spec. Taylor’s set makes clever use of different levels while Hannibal’s glass cell can glide into different positions, allowing scenes and characters to overlap without the stage becoming cluttered. It gives the production a cinematic slickness while still feeling theatrical.
I was far more engaged with the second act, when the battle of wills heightens between Clarice, Hannibal and the FBI, parallelled by Jame Gumb and Catherine. Lottie Amor gives Catherine real survival instinct, she is biding her time, managing Gumb during the worst possible moment of her life and trying to persuade him to see her as a person rather than a pelt.
Clarice is doing a similar thing in a different arena – pandering, accommodating and continually proving herself to the men around her, to get where she needs to go. And balancing this by teasing vital information from Lecter. Ironically, Hannibal sometimes seems the easiest of them for her to manage.
The first half was too angry for me, but one quieter moment I felt worked well was when Clarice was dealing with the body of Kimberly Jane Emberg, the murdered young woman with the glittery nail polish who was the seamstress and instrumental to the plot. She listens, looks at and actually sees the young policemen who brought the body in and how he needed to stay with her.
The Silence of the Lambs at The Lowry is slick, grisly and visually impressive. For me it finds real bite after the interval, when the psychological games finally take control.
The Silence of the Lambs is at Lowry, Salford from 7-10 October 2026.