SEATTLE _ National Theatre of Scotland is a strange and unpredictable beast.
It calls itself "a theater without walls"_it has no dedicated, brick-and-mortar home_but has created over 200 productions in hotels, abandoned tenements, schools, museums and, sometimes, theaters.
National Theater of Scotland (NTS) got off to a rowdy, experimental start in 2006 with "Home": 10 site-specific performances strung across Scotland, including what The Scotsman called "a surreal 35-minute session of the Scottish Parliament, written by seven primary-school children."
The theater tours internationally and keeps its audiences guessing. In the past few years, Seattle has seen its unsettling "Black Watch" (about a Scottish regiment that goes to Iraq, with a small audience "embedded" with the soldiers) and "The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart" (a raucous, immersive show, set in a pub and based on grim Scottish ballads).
Now NTS is bringing another species of strange, unpredictable beast to Seattle: the child vampire Eli from John Ajvide Lindqvist's chilling horror-romance "Let the Right One In," adapted for the stage by English playwright John Thorne.
"Let the Right One In," also adapted for a Swedish film in 2008, tracks Eli's budding friendship with Oskar, a timid 12-year-old boy who is regularly bullied at school. At first blush, it's an odd match. Eli, who seems like a pale, reclusive girl (though looks can be deceiving), is a predator. Oskar is everyone's prey.
But they're both outsiders.
"Let the Right One In," Thorne said, "is a genius exploration of alienation in all its forms. Loneliness is something I'm drawn to again and again_but it's particularly brilliant in the theater, when you're squashed in amongst so many other people."
Thorne has also written a stage adaptation of "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child," working with NTS director John Tiffany, who directed "Black Watch" and won a Tony Award for his direction of the musical "Once."
Tiffany, Thorne said, "is a director I've long admired-slash-stalked ... (he) is a visual poet who also manages to find the smallest textual detail in the script. I don't think there are many directors who can do both_he does both seemingly with ease."
Unlike some NTS productions, "Let the Right One In" is not immersive_but reviews typically mention the set's eerie, tree-filled snowscape, intense lighting and sound design and jarring special effects. (In a review of the show's New York run, critic Hilton Als ambivalently described them "sensationalistic and stimulating.")
The production, Thorne said, "is full of creative solutions" for its special effects_there is, apparently, plenty of blood when Eli claims a victim_but added, "I don't want to spoil them by explaining them here."
Thorne would only allow one hint.
In a scene from the novel, Oskar is attacked by classmates in a swimming pool and Eli comes to his rescue_with violent vengeance.
He said what Tiffany, movement director Steven Hoggett and designer Christine Jones "have constructed for that scene is masterful."
We'll see.
