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Let the Right One In

Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow

Four stars

 

Blood is a lot thicker than water for Oskar and his new friend Eli in Jack Thorne’s stage version of Swedish writer John Ajvide Lindqvist’s much-filmed teen vampire novel. Revived here by director Finn den Hertog in a production performed by final year acting students at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Oskar is a teenage schoolboy bullied by the tough kids at school. Eli appears to be the girl next door who can more than hold her own in a scrap. 

 

As their friendship clicks, the pair tap out after dark messages to each other in morse code on the bedroom wall they share. When the local murder rate increases at the hands of some kind of blood sucking serial killer, alas, for Eli and Oskar, the going gets weird.

 

Den Hertog has his cast play out Oskar and Eli’s slow burning rites of passage at an almost funereal pace that at times resembles a Scandi-noir thriller rather than the spate of supernatural TV with which it is a naturally strange bedfellow. This serves to ramp up the eeriness of the relationship between Oskar’s terminal geek and Eli’s ancient entity in a youthful body that can only survive by devouring people. The pair become lost boy and girl fugitives, with little sign of them being caught. 

 

There is something deeply affecting seeing a company of actors not that much older than the play’s protagonists embody the essence of their characters so successfully. With two casts alternating lead roles, the Wednesday matinee saw Sophie Fortune’s Eli and David Djemal Rukin’s Oskar find solace with each other as two very different products of their damaged pasts embark on their you-and-me-against-the-world adventure.

 

They are given plenty of room to do this on Emma Moran’s wide-open tiled set that uses the full expanse of the New Athenaeum stage. Like the play, she and den Hertog leave lots of space for the cast to breathe in its sensual and hormonal air in a play loaded with the potential for sex and death round every corner. This is pulsed by the cracked folk stylings and industrial gothic of Julia Coulthard’s complementary sound design.

 

With the full cast of ten skilfully moving between bullies, teachers and cops with the same sense of languor, there is no conventional judgement here. As Eli and Oskar become the ultimate high school outsiders, their journey has only just begun in a show that takes no prisoners.


The Herald, November 1st 2025

 

ends

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