When FBI trainee Clarice Starling is sent to interview the psychiatrist and infamous murderer Hannibal Lecter, it’s hoped his brilliant mind will help catch sadistic new serial killer, Buffalo Bill. Another girl is missing, and time is running out.

But Dr Lecter has questions of his own, and now Clarice must decide: keep a safe distance, or let Hannibal ‘The Cannibal’ into her head?

Right well let’s deal with this up front. It is brilliant. It’s brilliant if you haven’t seen the film, it’s brilliant if you have. Don’t compare two different art forms as they hold different principles and values. Likewise you can’t compare the film to the book.

But having first seen the film back in 1992 when babysitting and ‘the mum’ left me the VHS to watch as a treat (with a box of chocolates) I am going to admit full scepticism ahead of curtain up.

How on earth were they going to visit that dark, dark world on stage in Salford. What potentially camp, contemporary spin were they going to apply to it to bridge the gaps with the full risk that it wouldn’t land?

Get back in your box, you cynical little honorary Mancunian, you. It was bloody brilliant. Literally and figuratively, may I add.

We had a clue this production was pulling no punches and wasn’t about to deliver a diluted version for the stage which was neither use nor ornament for those drawn to the theatre based on the dark themes. I’d better water down my own words though as I tell you the tone was set by Miggs’s flagrant use of language to unsettle our Clarice Starling . A strange comfort, but a comfort all the same.

Clarice. Let’s talk about Mollie Gallagher. Most will know her from the cast of Coronation Street, playing Nina, the niece of Roy Cropper, a role won straight out of drama school. This is her first professional theatre debut. And honestly, what a debut it is. Again, had you told me the depiction would be taken straight from that of Jodie Foster’s, I would have admittedly eye rolled and again wondered how that could work. But work it did. I swear from her first uttered lines in that inimitable (at least I thought) accent, there was an appreciative gasp in the theatre. And without a foot wrong, embodied this role.

But, reader (hi mum), what of our villain of the piece – well one of them, we’ll get to the next shortly – one Dr Hannibal Lecter. Step forward John Partridge, a seasoned West End actor and, like Mollie, not without his own brand of soap infamy in the shape of Eastenders.

He was chilling. This felt a different Hannibal but only slight in style and delivery, but definitely bringing the fear in the familiar cadence we’ve come to expect from our favourite fictional cannibal (what you’ve got a better one?!!).

The iconography a lot of us will be familiar with is wall to glass wall. From the cell, the sliding security tray, the trolley wheeling our upright anti-hero around like a billy bookcase to the tills in Ikea,to even the dressmaker’s dummy with its functionality destined for something darker than an ‘occasion’ dress.

And so to the set, costume, lighting and projection designers – equal praise to all – with a simple framework of props and furniture, we went from the FBI offices, to a high security prison, to the ‘lair’ of Buffalo Bill, to a funeral home cum mortuary, to the streets of Ohio and even the Bahamas, each is sufficiently authentic to provide a non-intrusive but believable backdrop to the dialogue playing out before us.

Buffalo Bill. Let’s turn our attentions to a character who is always the serial killer bridesmaid but never the serial killer bride next to our Hannibal. But for many, an iconic character in himself and certainly played pitch perfectly by Sam Jackson in this production.

As the story reaches its crescendo, clever devices and choreography allow us to remain privy to his unravelling mind and behaviours at the same time that Hannibal and Clarice continue to perform their hypnotic quid-pro-quo two-handers in the latter’s quest for clues from the former, who slithers more and more into her mind, coveting her own back story and sadness.

Readers. This play is gory, it’s grim, it has oedipal issues which more than rivals that of the great Normal Bates and it doesn’t shy away from any of the reasons the origin text remains one of the most infamous in pop-culture.

Whilst I have waxed lyrically and inevitably about the film, for those who have never seen but like their plays to be dark, their themes harrowing and unequivocally unflinching, there is much to appreciate here. And for those who don’t? I hear Billy Elliott the musical is a right laugh.

For more details, timings, tickets, cast and production , head to Lowry website. Silence of the Lambs is on until 10 October before continuing its tour.

Sleep well.

Production credits: Marc Brenner