The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Simon Stephens, based on novel by Mark Haddon
Directed by Roger Beaumont
Questors Theatre, Ealing
Star rating: 3.5
It’s good to meet Christopher Boone (Rory Hobson) again. Mark Haddon’s unforgettable 2003 best selling novel first saw the light of day as a play at the National Theatre in 2013 where I saw and loved it – and Luke Treadaway won an Olivier Award. It has toured extensively since and I saw an abridged NT production in a school at one point. It’s powerful material and Rory Hobson is terrific in this production as troubled, literalist, mathematically talented Christopher – huddling in terror, screaming if he’s touched and giving a warmly convincing account of how it feels and looks to be at this point on the autistic spectrum.
Interestingly though, Mark Haddon never saw it as a book about autism. He set out to write a book about family tensions with a Sherlock Holmes joke in the title. It is now used as a text book on autism training courses, about which Haddon apparently has mixed feelings.
The truth of course is that it’s about a lot of things including friendship, empathy, communication and even mathematics. That’s why it engages so well. Simon Stephens’s script develops the character of Siobahn, Christopher’s special needs teacher, into a narrator who reads aloud from the book she has persuaded Christopeher to write and Claire Durrant is excellent in this role. She finds exactly the right level of assertive kindness when she’s in conversation with Christopher and she voices him perfectly.
Andrew Miller is good as Christopher’s troubled, deserted father and Holly Gillanders makes a fine job of Judy, his mother. Both are complex characters trying to do their best for Christopher but behaving badly and making mistakes because life is very difficult. Beyond that is an ensemble of six who multi-role many other characters, some stronger than others. They also do neatly directed, witty things with mime – such as becoming an ATM, a group of passengers in a tube train or a railway ticket barrier. The moments when Christopher is overwhelmed – on arrival at Paddington Station, for instance, are very effective too because we feel as if we’re inside his head.
And it’s all played on a simple geometric set (Rose Beaumont and Leon Chmabers) just as the original NT production was. Chambers’s video designs add a lot of visual interest too especially when Christopher is using maths to calm himself down.
I was expecting the lovely surprise for Christopher at the end but many of the audience I saw it with were evidently unfamiliar with this story so it was a nice moment.
