Stranger things turn an English village upside down in Max Porter’s rural noir Lanny

Bristol Old Vic A family are just getting used to their new home in this haunting drama when a parallel world emerges Overheard in the auditorium during the interval: it’s like Tales of the Unexpected meets Jackanory.

But if those references are dated by several decades, they go some way to summing up the strange mix of elements in this drama about a boy who goes missing from a village, and the ancient myth of a “green man” who might have something to do with it. But then, Max Porter’s novel , on which it is based, weaves so many seemingly…