John Partridge has spent almost four decades inhabiting some of theatre’s most recognisable characters. Now, as The Silence of the Lambs comes to New Theatre Oxford, he is taking on one of the most indelible figures in modern popular culture — Hannibal Lecter — alongside Mollie Gallagher, making her professional stage debut as Clarice Starling.

We spent time with John and Mollie to explore the process of bringing these iconic characters to the stage, the complex relationship between them, the strange intimacy of performing behind glass and what happens when a cinematic classic is reimagined for the theatre.

There are roles for which an actor can draw upon a character’s established history, and there are those in which the history of the performance itself becomes part of the challenge. Hannibal Lecter belongs firmly in the latter category.

Since Anthony Hopkins’s Oscar-winning performance in the 1991 film adaptation of Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs, Lecter has become one of the most recognisable villains in popular culture: cultivated, articulate and unnervingly composed, his menace deriving as much from restraint as violence.

For John Partridge, who now takes the role in a major new stage adaptation, the problem was therefore not simply how to play Lecter, but how to make him his own.

“When I first heard about it being put on, I thought, ‘Ooh, that would be fantastic!’” he recalls. Ahead of his audition, Partridge was sent the script and asked to prepare two scenes. He enlisted his friend Tamzin Outhwaite to read with him; when she discovered what the material was, her reaction was immediate. “Oh my god!”

Partridge’s own reaction has proved rather more considered. He was a teenager when The Silence of the Lambs appeared in cinemas, part of the generation for whom Hopkins’s Lecter quickly became inseparable from the character itself. “I’m a child of the 70s, so when the film came out in 1991, I was one of those core Silence viewers,” he says. “It lives in our zeitgeist.”

That familiarity could easily become a constraint. Instead, Partridge found a way of using it as a starting point. He was intrigued to learn that Hopkins had drawn on such unexpected influences as Truman Capote, Katharine Hepburn and HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey when constructing his Lecter. The revelation gave Partridge permission to undertake a similar act of imaginative disassembly.

“My three are Cary Grant, Elizabeth Taylor, and John Malkovich,” he says. “Lecter is intelligent, mocking and acerbic, but also serious and malevolent. Now, I try to forget any other version of Lecter and just put myself firmly in that cell.”

That cell is one of the defining features of the stage production. For much of the play, Lecter is physically confined behind glass, a visual image familiar from the story but transformed by the theatre’s particular relationship between actor and audience. Cinema can place the viewer wherever the director chooses; theatre leaves the audience in the room, sharing the same space and the same passage of time as the performers.

Partridge initially wondered how he could overcome the obvious theatrical limitation of placing his character inside a box. The answer, he says, was to stop thinking about projecting beyond it and instead draw the audience towards him.

“When I was first placed in the box, I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, how do I push my performance beyond it?’ Then I realised that rather than trying to push, I have to pull the audience into the box.”

It is an approach that also reveals something about Partridge’s interpretation of Lecter. The character is not merely a monster imprisoned for the protection of others; he is a man who considers himself intellectually and aesthetically superior to the people who have confined him. He loves music and art, possesses considerable social grace and remains capable of exquisite courtesy even while discussing acts of extraordinary brutality. His physical confinement therefore becomes part of the psychological contest.

The stillness required of him is also a significant departure for an actor whose career has frequently involved expansive physical and vocal performances. Partridge trained in ballet at the Royal Ballet School before studying musical theatre, and at 16 joined the original UK tour of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats. His subsequent stage career has encompassed A Chorus Line, Grease, Starlight Express, Tommy, Cabaret and Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, alongside television work that includes his long-running role as Christian Clarke in EastEnders.

“Lots of the roles I’m known for are quite gregarious,” he says. “I’ve played a lot of larger-than-life characters. Lecter is larger-than-life, but it’s very, very different.”

At 55, Partridge sees the role as an opportunity to draw together experiences accumulated over a long career rather than discard them in favour of something entirely new. “If you’re lucky enough to be in this business for a long time — I’m 55 now, I went into Cats when I was 16 — parts like this come along where you can roll up everything you’ve done, and colour with all the crayons in your colouring box.”

His dance training has consequently become part of the performance in a more restrained form. Lecter’s movements are economical, but they are not without precision; the physical discipline of ballet can be repurposed as control. “I can use my dance background, my physicality, in a new way to inhabit Lecter,” Partridge says, while drawing on “the actor I am now, with all my experience” to bring him to life.

If Lecter is defined by his control, Clarice Starling enters the story having to learn how to establish her own authority. Mollie Gallagher, best known for playing Nina Lucas in Coronation Street, makes her professional theatre debut as the FBI trainee whose investigation brings her into Lecter’s orbit.

For Gallagher, the role carries its own cultural weight. She has always loved the film, and the character of Clarice was familiar long before she was asked to play her. “She’s such an iconic heroine,” she says. “You can’t get much cooler than Clarice. She’s a badass.”

Yet Gallagher has deliberately avoided simply reproducing Jodie Foster’s performance. Her preparation has involved changing the way she holds herself and speaks. Clarice’s voice sits lower, her physicality is more grounded, and her movements are more deliberate.

“I’m quite airy, whereas Clarice is the complete opposite,” Gallagher says. “She’s grounded at all times.”

The transformation has extended beyond technique. Gallagher describes Clarice as highly intelligent, articulate and psychologically disciplined, qualities that require her to move beyond the instincts she associates with herself. “Weirdly, she makes me feel stronger and more confident. Now, in any situation in life, I can just think, ‘What would Clarice do?’”

There is, however, a personal point of connection. Clarice is an outsider within the FBI, a woman from West Virginia who has not inherited the wealth, status or institutional authority surrounding her. Gallagher identifies with the character’s working-class origins and with the experience of having to establish credibility in environments where she feels she is being judged before she has spoken.

“I feel like I have to prove myself every day — coming from my background and also being northern,” she says. “When I’m speaking to someone, I feel I have to articulate more to make them listen to me — basically speak a bit more ‘proper’.”

That understanding gives the central relationship a particular texture. Clarice is not simply the investigator seeking information from an imprisoned killer. She is also someone who has spent much of her life learning how to be taken seriously, now confronting a man who seems almost unnervingly capable of seeing through the carefully constructed version of herself she presents to the world.

Gallagher describes her conversations with Lecter as the point at which Clarice becomes most vulnerable. Her history, particularly the death of her father, is something she rarely discusses, yet Lecter draws it out of her. “No matter how powerful, smart and strong you are, that is really scary,” she says.

The relationship therefore develops into something more complicated than the conventional opposition between detective and criminal. Gallagher describes an unusual friendship emerging between the two, with Lecter becoming something like a confidant and therapist for Clarice even as she remains determined to extract information from him. By the end, she suggests, there is a sense of loss when that relationship disappears.

For Partridge, the theatrical potential of that exchange is almost musical. “It’s inherently theatrical. It’s like a dance: I invite her to dance with me.” He describes the scenes between Lecter and Clarice as “a tight tennis match”, with each character attempting to anticipate the other’s next move.

The chemistry between the two actors appears to have developed quickly. Gallagher says that from the first read-through they could look at one another and immediately find the connection. Partridge describes her as an instinctive actor, noting that she, like him, did not follow the conventional route into drama training. Gallagher’s first professional theatre role is therefore opposite an actor with decades of stage experience, yet she says Partridge has made the process unusually easy.

“He’s amazing — I couldn’t ask for anyone better to do this with,” she says. “He is the loveliest man, and then he summons this darkness. Sometimes we’ll be chatting, and he’ll do this look, and I’ll be like, ‘Oh no, Hannibal’s here!’”

The production’s adaptation by Gina Gionfriddo is equally important to that dynamic. Rather than attempting to reproduce the film scene by scene, the playwright has created a version for the stage that combines Harris’s material with new writing. Partridge believes the two elements have been integrated almost invisibly. “She’s managed to weave her words in with Thomas Harris so seamlessly — it’s as if Buffalo Bill has stitched it together himself.”

That theatrical reinvention extends to some of the story’s more problematic elements. The production has changed Buffalo Bill’s treatment of gender identity from the original novel and film, removing the implication that a transgender identity itself is connected to the character’s violence. Partridge says the decision was important to the production’s contemporary perspective.

“We do not need to be villainising our trans brothers and sisters in that way,” he says. “Our story is much stronger for the changes we’ve made.”

The production also retains the story’s interest in behavioural science and criminal profiling, which occupies an intriguing position within its 1980s setting. The detectives who believe that violent offenders can be understood through their psychology are treated with scepticism, while Lecter dismisses profiling as a form of “junk science”. Yet the investigation depends upon precisely the kind of psychological understanding that the established authorities are reluctant to embrace.

For Partridge, the emergence of behavioural science is one of the story’s most interesting elements. “That science changed the world,” he says. “Profiling, understanding the mind of a killer, was a game-changer.”

The broader social context is also something Partridge has considered closely. He points to the production’s depiction of attitudes towards women, policing and gender during the 1980s, and draws connections to contemporary debates around misogyny, gender equality and the rights of LGBT people. These are his interpretations of the themes rather than a claim that the historical and contemporary contexts are identical, but they illustrate why the production is not being approached simply as a nostalgic recreation of a celebrated film.

For Gallagher, the enduring appeal is more direct. She is a committed fan of horror and thrillers, and says that when she was younger, “horror, horror, horror” was always her answer when asked what she wanted to perform. The opportunity to originate Clarice on stage therefore combines a character she has admired with the genre she already loves.

It also arrives at a moment when theatre audiences have shown an appetite for adapting familiar cinematic thrillers for live performance. Partridge sees The Silence of the Lambs as occupying a distinctive place within that trend.

“It’s the godfather of them all — the holy grail of psychological thrillers,” he says.

Whether that reputation can survive the transition from screen to stage is ultimately something the audience has to decide. The production’s task is not to compete with the film on its own terms, but to exploit what theatre can do differently: the proximity, the shared silence, the absence of an edit and the knowledge that the actors are performing the encounter in front of you, night after night.

That becomes particularly significant when the central figure is a character whose power has always depended on the sensation that he is studying the person watching him.

When The Silence of the Lambs arrives at New Theatre Oxford, John Partridge will once again enter Lecter’s glass cell. Mollie Gallagher will sit opposite him as Clarice Starling, bringing a character she has admired from the screen into an entirely different medium.

For Partridge, the attraction of the role may ultimately be its contradiction. Lecter has been seen before by millions, yet the theatre offers the possibility of seeing him anew — not through the camera’s eye, but at close range, in real time, with the audience sharing the same room.

The question is no longer simply what Lecter will do next. It is what happens when the audience is close enough to watch him think.

The Silence of the Lambs comes to New Theatre Oxford from 19 to 24 October 2026.

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From a post-apocalyptic coastline to a remote Hebridean island, the six shortlisted novels examine the limits of understanding, the pressures of belonging and the private lives concealed beneath public appearances.

The six novels shortlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize range from a surreal vision of a world after catastrophe to an intimate portrait of family life in the Outer Hebrides. Their settings and styles differ sharply, but together they return to a common preoccupation: how little people can know of one another, even when their lives are bound together by family, friendship, desire or fear.

The shortlist, announced by the Booker Prize Foundation, includes previous winners Marlon James and Douglas Stuart, alongside Elizabeth Strout, a three-time nominee for the award. M. John Harrison, Luke Kennard and Rebecca Perry complete a selection that moves between speculative fiction, campus satire, historical storytelling and contemporary realism.

Chosen from a longlist of 13 books drawn from 163 submissions, the final six were selected by a judging panel chaired by classicist, author and broadcaster Mary Beard. The winner will be announced at a ceremony at Old Billingsgate in London on 9 November, receiving £50,000. Each shortlisted author will receive £2,500.

What distinguishes the selection is not a single literary movement or subject, but the range of ways in which its authors approach uncertainty: through social violence, family conflict, concealed identities, historical imagination and the increasingly fragile boundaries between private experience and the world beyond it.

Six books, six examinations of belonging

In The End of Everything, M. John Harrison turns the familiar conventions of post-apocalyptic fiction into something more disquieting. Phillip Tennent makes a precarious living collecting objects washed ashore by the Channel, years after a crisis whose precise nature remains obscure. Government has largely ceased to function, unfamiliar creatures inhabit the seas and Europe itself appears to have been lost.

The discovery of a shape-shifting creature forces Phillip away from the coastline and into an uncertain interior world. Harrison uses the premise not simply to imagine the aftermath of catastrophe, but to question the assumptions through which people make sense of reality. The result, according to the book’s publisher, is a satirical and unsettling adventure in which the familiar distinction between the known and the unknowable begins to break down.

Where Harrison approaches uncertainty through speculative fiction, Marlon James locates it in the consequences of hatred and exclusion. The Disappearers returns to the Jamaica of his Booker Prize-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings, setting its central events in Kingston in 1988.

Eight gay men respond to a casting call for an openly queer play, taking a considerable risk simply by assembling. When a mob attacks a rehearsal, one man dies, everyone present is injured and two subsequently disappear. The survivors must decide how to live with the violence: whether to suppress its memory, answer it with anger or withdraw from a society that refuses to accept them.

James’s novel follows the consequences of that night through a story concerned with both collective persecution and individual survival. Its central question is not only what violence does to its victims, but what happens when a society makes certain people unsafe in their own lives. The search for those who have disappeared becomes inseparable from the wider struggle to confront the perpetrators and the prejudice that enabled them.

Luke Kennard’s Black Bag approaches contemporary anxieties about identity and masculinity through absurdity. Its protagonist, a penniless actor, accepts work with a university professor conducting a psychological experiment. His task is to sit at the back of lecture theatres inside an oversized black bag, concealed from the students around him.

The arrangement soon develops beyond the experiment’s original purpose. A professor of post-humanism begins asking her own questions, including whether it is possible to love someone whose identity is hidden inside a bag. Meanwhile, the actor’s childhood friend sees commercial possibilities in the unusual situation.

Kennard uses the conceit to unsettle assumptions about visibility, intimacy and the performance of identity. The campus novel becomes a comic investigation into how men understand themselves and relate to others, with friendship and tenderness emerging beneath the deliberately outlandish premise. Its humour also offers a counterpoint to the shortlist’s darker examinations of isolation and social hostility.

In May We Feed the King, Rebecca Perry shifts attention to the relationship between the present and the past. Her protagonist is a curator who dresses the rooms of historic buildings, bringing their former occupants and surroundings back to life. While working in a medieval palace, she becomes absorbed in the reign of a largely forgotten king, to the point where her fascination begins to blur the boundaries of her own existence.

The king, meanwhile, has assumed the throne reluctantly after the deaths of his older brothers. With little appetite for power, he faces mounting doubts about his fitness to rule and the possibility that another figure might take his place.

Perry moves between the two lives, using the historical setting to explore how reputations are constructed and how stories shape our understanding of people who are no longer able to tell their own. The novel’s interest in what makes a ruler great is matched by a more intimate question: whether retreating into the past can help someone recover a sense of meaning in the present.

Elizabeth Strout’s The Things We Never Say brings the shortlist back to the apparent ordinariness of contemporary life. Artie Dam is a high-school history teacher in coastal Massachusetts, a husband of three decades and a familiar presence in his neighbourhood. He spends his days educating pupils, offering kindness where he can and maintaining the routines of a comfortable life.

Yet beneath this outward stability lies a persistent sense of isolation. Artie wonders how people can remain so unfamiliar to one another, including those with whom they share their lives. When he discovers a secret that threatens to overturn his understanding of his own circumstances, he must reconsider the relationships he has taken for granted.

Strout’s subject is the distance between a person’s public life and private experience, and the way an undisclosed truth can alter the meaning of years of apparently settled existence. Grief, friendship and the possibility of beginning again emerge from a story that treats ordinary relationships as sites of profound uncertainty.

The final novel, Douglas Stuart’s John of John, explores the same tensions through a family rooted in the traditions of the Outer Hebrides. John-Calum Macleod returns to the island of Harris after his art-school education has failed to provide him with a clear future. At home, he finds a life shaped by the competing influences of his father, John, a sheep farmer, weaver and pillar of the local Presbyterian church, and his grandmother Ella, who has spent decades maintaining a fragile peace within the family.

Cal’s return exposes the distance between his aspirations and the expectations of the community he has left behind. His father is troubled by his son’s long hair and apparent reluctance to embrace religious salvation, while Cal finds himself wondering whether there might be other lonely men in the surrounding landscape.

As the seasons pass, the family’s tensions become entangled with the future of the wider community. Stuart, whose Shuggie Bain won the Booker Prize in 2020, returns to questions of masculinity, religion, sexuality and class, examining how affection can coexist with disapproval and how the bonds of home can sustain as well as constrain.

The limits of knowing another person

Read together, the novels suggest that isolation takes many forms. In Harrison’s imagined aftermath, the world itself becomes difficult to interpret. In James’s Jamaica, social prejudice determines who can live openly and who must disappear. Kennard’s actor is physically concealed even as his presence provokes questions about intimacy; Perry’s curator becomes absorbed in a historical life while negotiating her own. Strout’s teacher discovers that familiarity offers no guarantee of understanding, while Stuart’s returning son finds that homecoming cannot erase the divisions that shaped him.

The connections are thematic rather than uniform. The shortlist places comedy alongside violence, speculative invention beside domestic realism, and historical distance beside the immediacy of family conflict. Its characters do not all seek the same kind of resolution, nor do their circumstances offer comparable degrees of freedom. What unites them is the difficulty of reconciling the stories people tell about themselves with the lives they actually lead.

Beard said the judges had not begun their deliberations with a checklist of genres, subjects or types of author they wanted to include. Instead, the final selection emerged from discussion of the 13 longlisted books, many of which the judges had read more than once.

She described a group of novels ranging from the hilarious to the discomfiting, and from the frighteningly strange to the unexpectedly domestic. The shortlist, she said, offered both enjoyment and writing capable of changing how readers see the world.

Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, also identified isolation as a connecting concern, pointing to relationships that break down or are withheld, characters who harbour secrets or pain, and people attempting to reach beyond their solitude.

The result is a shortlist that places established literary reputations alongside writers reaching this stage of the prize for the first time. James and Stuart return as previous winners, while Strout brings further experience of the competition. For Harrison, Kennard and Perry, the selection offers a different kind of recognition, bringing their work into the same conversation.

When will the Booker Prize 2026 winner be announced?

The winner will be announced on Monday, 9 November 2026, at Old Billingsgate in London. The winning author will receive £50,000, with the other five shortlisted writers each receiving £2,500.

The Booker Prize has recognised fiction written in English and published in the UK or Ireland since 1969. Its annual selection draws attention not only to individual books but also to the changing range of subjects, forms and voices represented in contemporary fiction.

This year’s six novels offer no single answer to the question of what it means to understand another person. Instead, they approach it from different directions, examining the pressures of history, family, identity and society on lives that are never quite as straightforward as they appear.