SILENCE! The Musical

This surreal musical spoof of the Silence of The Lambs film is audacious, explicit, and wickedly funny.

The show originally opened in New York in 2005, following on from the 1991 Oscar winning film, and this new production has revived the show for an Edinburgh Festival run, previewing at Norwich Theatre Playhouse.

The main chronology is relatively faithful to the screenplay, focusing on the sparring between trainee FBI agent Clarice and creepy cannibal and psychiatrist Dr Hannibal Lecter, but the way it approaches it could hardly be more different.

The lambs – purely a metaphor in the book – are front and centre, with a fluffy-eared and hooved ensemble opening the show and between them playing most of the minor parts.

They are also crucial to the choreography, including a memorable interview scene between Lecter, played by Mark Oxtoby, and Clarice, played by Phoebe Panaretos. With the two seated either side of a desk-mounted plastic screen, the ‘lambs’ rotate the protagonists’ swivel chairs and the caster-mounted furniture as the two leads sing their hearts out.

Is it smooth? No. Is it funny, yes. If you can cope with that level of surrealism, and some very choice language (If I Could Smell Her C— is one of the big numbers) , this could be the show for you.

Panaretos nails Clarice’s verbal tics and manages to mostly keep a straight face despite her bizarre surroundings and the occasional break out of jazz hands. Oxtoby is a brilliantly dead pan Lecter, camply menacing even when dancing.

Jake Anthony emphasises the creepy as Buffalo Bill, while Catherine Millsom reaches some operatic high notes as his targeted victim (reprising her role from UK debut production in 2010). There is a brilliantly performed cameo for Jenay Naima as Clarice’s roommate, even if it is inexplicable plot-wise.

The set and design is surprisingly basic in places given the show’s pedigree, but it’s 10-strong cast is big for a festival show. Lambs don’t come cheap.

There are also a couple of places where the show’s energy wanes a little, but they are the anomalies in it’s 60 minute run. Overall it’s a neatly observed, surreal homily to one of greatest films of the 1990s, just think cheap thrills instead of thriller.