The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time: NT Live
Urania theatre Nov 20th Budapest
Having both read the book (shortly after it came out) and taught it) recently, I was very keen to see this famous production – every time when it was on in London and I was in town, tickets were unobtainable. Now I have and it was as spectacular as I had been led to believe – although this is not to say that it, (both production and adaptation) were without their weaknesses.
The book takes us inside the mind of a person with Asperger’s (he narrates) and does it very vividly so that the reader has, I feel, a really good sense of what it is like to experience the world in the way that someone with this condition does. The production tried, mostly very successfully, to mimic this by using a range of theatrical techniques to make us feel immersed in the production. The fact that it was staged in the round helped this as did the occasional use of bird’s eye POV, particularly when Christopher was on a journey from A to B and necessarily interacting with the everyday world with which he was totally unfamiliar. I initially thought that using this POV denied us something of the true theatrical experience which these NT live events invariably and very successfully do., However I gathered from someone who saw the original production that the audience were a little above the acting area and so would have had this sense and perspective. His way of moving as if on specified rack was very well conveyed by using illuminated lines on the stage, which mimicked what, I assume, was in his head.
At the start, and for much of the first act, I had doubts about how theatrically effective the adaptation was going to be. Certainly, from the opening (which was very sudden and surprising and somewhat caught me off guard) it seemed to be rather dully literal and simply a basic enactment of the events of the book. The relationship between Christopher and his father was very well conveyed by the superb acting, particularly by Luke Treadaway as Christopher. However, after the confrontation between Christopher and his father when the revelation is made about what happened to his mother the performance seemed to move up a notch and the last part of the Act was stunning. Not least because there was so much intense silence and barely any movement – and yet the emotions, feelings between the two were made crystal clear.
Once Christopher embarks on his journey however he has to move into the ‘normal’ world’ and here the production excelled. The other company members became people, and objects and the ‘oddness’ of this was marvellous way of helping us see the world through C’s eyes. There was much physical action too, which emphasised how alien the world would be to C and how difficult and inexplicable it seemed to him. The sense of seeing every event through C’s eyes was superbly sustained – for the whole production but particularly strongly in Act 2. Details like the soundtrack being painfully loud at times also helped this sense of audience identification (I will assume this was deliberate and not an error on the part of the cinema!)
However in the second part there was a suggestion made that C should be involved in a play and that perhaps the story he had written (and for which Siobhan, his school helper acted largely as the narrator) could be dramatized. This conceit – a ‘meta’ reference for the audience making us, the audience, self-consciously aware that we were watching play in the theatre – was odd and I found it very unconvincing. It seemed to be inserted relatively late in the play and did not seem to be consistently developed and referenced. I could see how it could work and the conceit, as a dramatic conceit can be used really well, but here I felt it was not. Hope have conveyed this clearly – am not sure I have though!
Loved the ending post curtain call where C told us how he solved his Maths problem. That, along with his thoughts about the universe were powerfully moving moment that made us see how C saw the world as not just baffling but wonderful. By what he said, he managed to convey some of that wonder to us, for me at least, opened my eyes, and helped me to see some aspects of the world in a different way. You cannot really ask much me of an artistic reaction than that - and it was the theatrical version of this that did this, not the reading of the book.