The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, novel and play (2)

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, novel and play (1)

So, I visited a theatre in London to watch the play of this work.

Some theatre sell special tickets in the morning. You can get a seat in the front row with only 15 GBP. To get one, I got there early morning and waited for opening the theatre at a cafe in front of it. At a half past 9 o'clock, a line for buying tickets began. So, I joined in it.

The front seat of the stall is not so good position to watch a play, to be honest. It is too close to the stage to look around the whole stage at a glance. You hardly recognize what kind of items are on the ground of the stage. On the other hand, you can look at actors' faces in detail. It is fantastic. I felt as if the breath of the actors reached me.

The play was awesome. Christopher almost always had some strange gestures such as keep fiddling his fingers or rolling a pen. They are known as autistic behaviors frequently seen in patients with Autism. Christopher has some other rituals to calm himself down. He sometimes recites prime numbers. Such actions looked not studied, but quite natural.

I wondered how to describe Christopher's feeling in the play. In the novel, he wrote his thoughts in detail in every scene. But actually, he was very bad at express his emotion on time. Thus, it would be unnatural if he talked about his thought with his own tongue. In the play, Ms. Siobhan, who understand his character the most deeply, read his diary instead of him, to explain his thought of mind in some scene. It is a cool direction. Actually, I felt it was a little redundant. In act 2, she never read his diary, suggesting that Christopher gradually becomes capable to express his mind.

The stage is surrounded by walls with cross strips. They worked very artificially. In some scenes, he drew something on the ground, meanwhile the wall projected it. The walls often express Christopher's confusion, with projecting prime numbers or some other busy movies.

Totally, I was very satisfied with the play. The storyline exactly copied the original novel. In addition, some directions were effective to make his own emotion visualized. I entirely enjoyed it.

This play has been introduced to Japan. Goh Morita, played it as Christopher.

Sankei: Goh Morita plays a boy with Asperger syndrome in "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time" (in Japanese)

*sequel