Come face to face with the chilling phenomenon The Silence of the Lambs, which comes to Sheffield’s Lyceum 4-8 May next year. 

Based on Thomas Harris’s literary masterpiece it stars former Eastenders actor John Partridge as Hannibal Lecter, Mollie Gallagher as Clarice Starling and Oliver Farnworth as agent Jack Crawford.

What interests you about the thriller genre?
Nikolai Foster: I have a real personal fascination with thrillers and true crime. It’s developed naturally over the years, reading books like Zodiac and the Thomas Harris novels, and watching loads of films and TV shows. Columbo is my go-to cop show – I can watch the same episodes over and over again. It’s incredible to be working on the absolute motherload of the genre with The Silence of the Lambs. This is the greatest thriller of all time.

Gina Gionfriddo: I like to say I was a true crime consumer before that was really a genre. In high school I was reading all these big books about serial killers. My mother was terribly concerned about what people would think. My gateway drug was a book called Fatal Vision, about what we now call family annihilators: men who murder their wife and children really without any warning or history of abuse. Now, true crime is everywhere. What keeps me coming back is the dark psychology: why people commit these terrible crimes.

Why is The Silence of the Lambs a good fit for stage?
Gionfriddo: From the beginning we’ve thought about this as a deep and rich two-character play about the relationship between Lecter and Clarice. What’s interesting is that Lecter sees her more clearly than she’s ever been seen, including what she’s hiding. There’s so much wonderful material in the novel that we’ve mined, digging into the interior lives of characters like Clarice and Jack Crawford [the head of the FBI’s Behavioural Science Unit] – the terrors that both the monsters and heroes are grappling with.

Foster: When I was storyboarding it, I was thinking about theatrical elements like where the scare moments are: where we thrill the audience and make them jump. Those are definitely in there. But it’s also a psychological thriller, which works incredibly well on stage. It’s about this duel of wits between two huge personalities in Clarice and Lecter. It’s a dynamic, exciting piece of theatre. It’s also perfect for stage because so many scenes are claustrophobic and intense: these face-offs between people who are trapped together. The audience is locked in that space with them.

What makes Clarice such an enduring icon?
Gionfriddo: She’s a great female protagonist for our age. I was very, very excited to write for her. She’s absolutely the heroine of the film, but there’s even more in the novel, and in the play – like her anger around class issues and the reasons for her essential loneliness. Lecter immediately breaks her down: he sees from her inexpensive clothing that she’s coming from a lower class. There’s a lot to tease out. 

The concept of the silence of the lambs is, at its heart, so very moving. What Lecter says to Clarice is you have this painful childhood memory of lambs being slaughtered, and you seem to think that if you rescue murdered women then that screaming inside of you is going to stop. It’s extraordinary her level of investment in saving these women, and its relationship to her own pain.

This was also a time when women, for the most part, did not have a place in the FBI. I can understand her experience – I’ve been in those situations, in TV writing rooms, where I was the only woman. My dilemma, which is also Clarice’s dilemma, is this tension between wanting to call out sexism and discuss it, versus just getting on and trying to achieve something. There are times when Clarice is left out or not taken seriously, but things are moving so quickly. She must catch this killer. So, she must hold her frustration and anger within her so she can keep moving and do her job.

Foster: It’s clear that this is a feminist novel: it’s a very powerful story about a woman from a working-class background, who has been ostracised, now training in the FBI’s cutting-edge new behavioural science unit in the basement. No one believes in that work, but she’s a visionary – she sees the future. She knows the only way you’re going to stop these killers, stop women being brutally raped and murdered, is to better understand their psychology. You can’t just think in binary terms: good and evil.

The play is also about a misogynistic, patriarchal society where women are second-class citizens. The endgame of that is that they are murdered. Clarice is the incredible heroine at the heart of that, with vision and courage and determination both in banishing her own demons while trying to protect women. 

This is a really gripping thriller, but it has a lot to say about that era and the world we live in today, with the manosphere, the celebration of the ‘alpha male’ and ‘bro’ culture.

How are you reflecting the 1980s setting?
Foster: It’s such an interesting era to look back on. There’s a sense of optimism, but the American Dream only really worked if you were a white bloke. Technology is key as well, like serial killers were able to avoid detection because there was no communication between the various states in the US, no way of passing on information, so the embryonic beginnings of the fax machine make all the difference. 

Our amazing composer Grant Olding and sound designer Carolyn Downing have created this eerie soundscape with creepy 80s synths – we’re able to lean into that. We’ve also got video projections creating a sexy, 80s retro look. I knew we couldn’t have dozens of naturalistic filmic locations, so instead we use projections, music, lighting and props, and the power of the audience’s imagination, to jump from location to location in a theatrical way. It should be dazzling for the audience to see this iconic story come to life in a way they’ve never seen before.

Are you looking at the story through a 21^st-century lens?
Gionfriddo: Yes, it’s fascinating to look back at the birth of behavioural science and criminal profiling, which at its inception was thought to be ridiculous – the idea that you could look at a crime and draw conclusions about who the killer was, rather than just hunting around for physical clues. Today, with true crime exploding as a genre, everyone listening considers themselves an armchair psychologist. 

But Silence is also a story that feels very pertinent to our world now. It’s notable that the female victims are not really considered – it’s only when the senator’s daughter is taken that the stakes get big. That’s the class aspect again. I know as a consumer of true crime that cases today likewise get a lot more attention if the female victim is a doctor or other professional, or of a higher social status.

If we focus on the killer, there is a risk of erasing the victims. The dilemma is how to honour their humanity even though their lives have been taken from them. We do that in the play through flashbacks. That element was important to me.

Foster: Clarice’s meetings with Lecter are like therapy sessions in which he gets her to go back to the root of her trauma, the murder of her father, and replay all of that. I’ve had therapy – I do exactly that sort of regression, learning how childhood trauma shaped us. 

That’s Thomas Harris being ahead of his time. Lecter asks us to consider why people commit these hideous crimes, whether trauma or society plays a role, but then offers the provocative idea that some people just enjoy it. That’s the hardest thing to understand. It’s an incredibly contemporary and complex story. 

How have you adapted the Jame Gumb/Buffalo Bill character for stage?
Foster: We’ve completely started again. That was one of the things Gina and I spoke about right at the beginning. Instead, we talked long and hard about who our Jame Gumb would be. He’s an amalgamation of serial killers like Ed Gein and Ted Bundy: an incredibly charismatic, attractive, very charming, very manipulative young man who can easily ask women to go for a drink and come home with him. 

Gionfriddo: I researched three real-life killers and leant hardest into Ed Gein, who had a very, very complicated relationship with his abusive mother. We’ve given our Jame Gumb a complex history in which his mother was a model, and she couldn’t continue modelling because of the caesarean scar from his birth. She was loved and then taken away. Now he’s focussed on re-creating his mother by building a skin suit so he can essentially go back into the womb where he felt the most secure, so that’s his objective in murdering all these women.

How are you feeling about the show premiering at Curve and going on tour?
Gionfriddo: I’m very excited. I saw The Umbrellas of Cherbourg at Curve, and I admire the theatre so much – it’s amazing to be working there. My work has been seen in London but certainly not in all these other wonderful places across the UK and Ireland, so I’m thrilled for people to see it and hopefully want to seek out more.

Foster: I’ve never directed a thriller before, and this is our first time premiering one at Curve, so I’m excited. There’s a whole new audience coming to see thrillers on stage – not necessarily a traditional theatregoing audience. It’s a fantastic thing, and I hope audiences at Curve and on tour will indeed be thrilled by what they see.

The Silence of the Lambs is at the Lyceum Theatre from 4-8 May 2027. For ticket information, click here.