Lecter’s Next Stage
DIRECTOR EXCLUSIVE
Lecter’s Next Stage
Nikolai Foster on giving The Silence Of The Lambs the theatrical treatment
WORDS: STEVE O’BRIEN
BRINGING A HIT MOVIE to the stage isn’t a new thing (think Back To The Future, Beetlejuice and The Lost Boys, among many others), but what is unusual is taking one of cinema’s greatest thrillers and turning it into a live experience. That was the challenge that director Nikolai Foster decided to undertake, breathing theatrical life into Jonathan Demme’s 1991 classic The Silence Of The Lambs.
“Thrillers traditionally do very well, and I thought, ‘Well, what is the greatest thriller of all time that’s never been done on stage?’” Foster tells Red Alert. “Being a massive fan of Thomas Harris’s novel, and also the film, I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it make a great stage adaptation?’ Then I said to myself, ‘Never in a million years would we get the rights.’ But I thought, ‘Fuck it, let’s ask Thomas Harris.’ So we did, and we got them, which is just incredible!”