An everyday story of boy meets vampire

When teenagers Eli and Oskar meet in the play Let the Right One In, the beginning of a chilling, yet deeply compassionate, vampire story are not entirely obvious.

This is the story of two outsiders. Oskar, bullied at school and living in a sterile housing estate in a Swedish suburb with his smothering mother, and Eli, an elfin otherworldly character who has just moved into the neighbourhood.

A fledgling friendship begins, but so do a series of gruesome murders in the area. Are they connected to Eli? Who is she? “I’m nothing,” she says to Oskar. “Not a child. Not old. Not a boy. Not a girl. Nothing.”

Alexander Berlage: ‘It’s fundamentally a beautiful storyline of two teenagers trying to find a connection.’Credit:Oscar Colman

Alexander Berlage, who is directing the production at Darlinghurst Theatre, describes Let the Right One In as a supernatural horror coming-of-age teenage romance.

“It’s fundamentally a beautiful storyline of two teenagers trying to find a connection, a sense of purpose and love in a world which is working against them,” he says. “And one of them happens to be a vampire and the other is an ordinary boy.”

Adapted from the 2004 novel and 2008 film Lad den rette komme ind by Swedish writer John Ajvide Lindqvist, Let the Right One In balances brutality and tender love, jump-in-your-seat scares and a coming-of-age story celebrating individuality.

Playwright Jack Thorne, who adapted the play, says the work’s combination of fantasy and reality allows it to ask big questions about society.

Jack Thorne: ‘People are being left alone, they’re being horribly bullied, they’re vulnerable.’Credit:Luis Enrique Ascui

“In social realism, you are critiquing the present and, with fantasy, you are exploring the possibilities of what the present could and should be,” he says. “Work set in the spectral can show the possibilities of what this world should be.”

Thorne’s Bafta Award-winning work, which ranges from writing Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, TV series Skins and Shameless and the screen adaptation of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, regularly focuses on the absence of care, on people forgotten or overlooked in society and the importance of a social conscience.

“I think our country and your country are going through quite a similar thing at the moment where the social contract around us is fracturing,” Thorne says. “People are being left alone, they’re being horribly bullied, they’re vulnerable.

“Let the Right One In is a love story that hopefully uplifts in some way but I hope people realise there’s such danger in allowing isolation to exist.”

Thorne holds up his arm, pointing to a tattoo on his wrist that says, “Be good”.

“It’s from ET,” he says. “I watched it when I was a kid, and it changed the way I felt about the world. The notion that there was an alien out there that might want to be my best friend was really important to me because I was a lonely, weird kid.

“Oskar is really lurching around trying to find something to hold onto. He hasn’t been taught much about love at all. And then along comes this other being who is just ready for him.

“Eli is openly hungry for information and is fascinated by him. He doesn’t really know how to ask questions, is inarticulate and small and trying to burst out of himself.

“It’s that intimacy, which I’ve always loved, of teenagers that can’t ask things, that are just not capable of it. I’m fascinated by those things and it’s the heart of the play.

“It is really a dark, beautiful love story. And, there are Oskars and Elis everywhere and we should all be rescuing them.”

Let the Right One In until November 20

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