Let the Right One In, Royal Court, review The scene is a forest grove containing an ugly metal structure, vaguely industrial in appearance. Snow on the ground reflects an eerie Northern twilight. Among the trees, figures move. There is nothing explicitly amiss, but a powerful intimation that these are all, somehow, lost souls. Oskar is a gentle boy, poised between childhood and adolescence. His mother is a sloppy drunk, his father is mostly absent; he is horribly bullied at school. When a vaguely sinister old man and a deathly pale young girl move in next door, a fragile friendship springs up between Oskar and his new neighbour. The girl, Eli, smells faintly of putrefaction. She claims never to have tasted a sweetie (unthinkable in Scotland), she's never seen a Rubik's cube, and she says she isn't a girl. But Oskar is captivated. The question is, what does she want from him? The expressive physicality of the production, with its dance-like choreography to a score by Icelandic composer Olafur Arnalds, suggests both the magic and the implacable cruelty of fairytale. The performances by Martin Quinn as Oskar and Rebecaa Benson as Eli are mesmerising. Benson combines a vampire's infinite remoteness and ruthless instinct for survival with a painful access of authentic feeling, while Quinn's lovely mixture of aching pathos, new-found sexual desire and subversive teenage wit catches the heart. There are fine performances from the supporting cast, including Graeme Dalling as the school bully, Jonny, and Christian Ortega as his sidekick, Micke. After the exquisitely measured build of tension up to the interval, the second act, with its thrilling coups de théâtre (involving a virtuoso display of breath control by Quinn) leaves some of the drama's more complicated emotional issues unresolved. But that, I suspect, is a flaw inherited from the original text. Certainly the elegance and originality of this production in all its aspects are not to be faulted. Until Dec 21. Tickets: 020 7565 5000; royalcourttheatre.com