An Undead Tale of the Teenage Years ‘Let the Right One In,’ a Stage Version of a Vampire Novel
Ben BrantleyJuly 8, 2014: And just when you thought you’d had your fill of young vampires in love, along comes a ravishing little romance of the undead that’s guaranteed to warm — and break — your heart, even as it chills your blood. Let the Right One In, which is bringing limelight to endless night at the Apollo Theater here, turns your emotions inside out in a way you probably haven’t experienced since you were a teenager. Such an inversion is fitting, since this latest exercise in exquisite agony from John Tiffany and Steven Hoggett (Black Watch, The Glass Menagerie) is all about the confusion, cruelty and moral anarchy of that purgatory we call adolescence. A production of the National Theater of Scotland, Right One offers the most gut-twisting presentation of the middle teens as a supernatural horror story since Brian De Palma’s movie cameras invaded the girls’ locker room in Carrie. Wait a minute. I can think of one more recent variation on the same theme that ranks with this impeccably realized play, and that would be the 2010 Swedish film of the same title. That Right One was written by John Ajvide Lindqvist, who adapted it from his own novel. It was such a tightly controlled, expressly cinematic study in terror that bringing it to the stage sounded like one of those lost-in-translation misfires for which theater people are famous these days.
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