The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime Book Review New York Times
Theater Review
Unnerved, Similar All of U.s.a., by Life'south Strangeness
LONDON — Yous need blinkers to navigate a big city, something to screen out the teeming surplus of ambient sights and sounds. Christopher Boone — the 15-year-old hero of the thrillingly staged adaptation of "The Curious Incident of the Domestic dog in the Night-Time" at the Apollo Theater — has no such apparatus at all. And on his beginning day in London, it's a lack that threatens to pulverize him.
Us as well. Every bit directed by Marianne Elliott, working with an inspired set of designers, Christopher'south maiden voyage into an alien metropolis becomes a virtuoso study in sensory overload. Those lights, noises, street signs, road maps, random words that spell themselves into existence, and, oh yes, that moving staircase that materializes out of nowhere: it all keeps coming at yous, to the indicate that you expect your heed to give up and shut downward.
Information technology doesn't of course. Nor does Christopher'southward, though the drenched, rigid grade of Luke Treadaway, the sensitive actor playing him, shows how much the experience has drained him. Yous'll observe your own muscles tightening in sympathy, and yous may experience a need to check your pulse.
How could information technology be otherwise? Christopher, who suffers from a disorder that would appear to exist Asperger's syndrome, finds it difficult enough to procedure the events of an afternoon at dwelling house in the town of Swindon. He'd be better off in outer space, which would at least exist quiet, than in London.
The extraordinary accomplishment of "The Curious Incident of the Domestic dog in the Night-Fourth dimension," which opened in the Westward End on Tuesday dark after a hot-ticket run at the National Theater last twelvemonth, is that it forces you to look at the world through Christopher's order-seeking eyes. In doing so you're likely to reconsider the dauntless battle your own mind is always waging against the onslaught of stimuli that is life.
Scary, isn't it? Exhilarating likewise. Adjusted by Simon Stephens from Mark Haddon's best-selling novel of 2003, "Dog" turns daily beingness into a perilous trek into the unknown, which of grade information technology is. The difference is that Christopher sees this with an acuity that hurts, and we're immune to feel his pain. Strange to think that this vicarious practice in disorientation may be the nigh entertaining family drama since the phase version of "War Equus caballus" galloped into international renown several years agone.
"Domestic dog" shares part of the full-blooded of "War Equus caballus," the story of a boy and his horse during World War I, which was also first staged at the National Theater nether the direction of Ms. Elliott (and Tom Morris), with Mr. Treadaway as the leading lad. The main flaws of "Dog" are also like those of "War Horse." Both shows are also long in the telling, and their sentimentality tin can on occasion slide into cuteness or, worse, condescension.
Just "Domestic dog" is besides like "War Horse" in its ability to create a theatrical world that somehow feels more lifelike than life itself. In "War Equus caballus" it was the title character and his equine peers, giant puppets summoned into beingness before our eyes, that were the source of that magical transformation.
Image
Here it's the inspired visuals that give pulsing course to the way one person thinks. The designer Bunny Christie has created a black graph-paper box of a ready that suggests provisional gild imposed on infinite darkness. Objects and clothes glow in the sort of neon-bright hues that manner editors keep vainly trying to push upon their readers but which accept a very serious reason to be in this product.
The colors are role of a crucial code past which Christopher identifies familiar images and helps keep at bay the roiling strangeness of what lies beyond. A whiz at the abstractions of mathematics, Christopher has what he calls (in Mr. Haddon's volume) "Behavioral Problems."
These are triggered whenever anyone or anything disrupts his tidy interior universe by touching him, perhaps, or speaking in metaphors. That'due south when his earth heaves and mutates, a process summoned by a technical team that includes Paule Constable (lighting), Finn Ross (video) and Ian Dickinson (sound).
These artists — along with the movement directors Scott Graham and Steven Hoggett — assist create the sensory equivalent of the get-go-person narration of Mr. Haddon'southward novel, in which Christopher sets out to solve several mysteries. These include what really happened to a dog found murdered in his neighborhood and the disappearance of his mother (a very practiced Holly Aird), whom his begetter (Sean Gleeson, offset rate) tells him died two years before the play begins.
To the credit of Mr. Stephens, a probing and original dramatist ("Harper Regan," "Port"), the plot is never less than articulate, no affair what detours information technology takes. The ensemble, as a whole, is scary and exaggerated in just the right ways in embodying the challenges posed past the existence of others. The problem for me comes in having Siobhan (Niamh Cusack), Christopher's special didactics teacher, recite the story he has written, presented as a school project.
Ms. Cusack does this with a gushy, artificial sense of wonder that you associate with grown-ups talking to small children. Though the device of Siobhan as an interpreter is retired for much of the second deed, she shows up over again to step outside the show and suggest that this play is a piece of work that Christopher has made by his very own cocky.
Yuck. Possibly the bespeak hither is that fifty-fifty the all-time-intentioned souls can exist patronizing about the struggles of the mentally challenged. Or peradventure the show's creators believed this tone of vocalization is necessary to appeal to the children in the audience. In any example it is likely to irritate anybody older than 8.
Mr. Treadaway, on the other paw, inhabits his character without distancing preciousness. He gives a lyrical, intensely physical performance that finds the verse in the ways Christopher both stretches out and shuts down.
Since "Dog" was first published Mr. Haddon has said that he objects to the term "Asperger'south syndrome" in defining Christopher. He should exist pleased that in this product his hero seems less like a example history than an extreme version of every one of the states, doing our daily best to make sense of our ain senses.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/14/theater/reviews/curious-incident-of-the-dog-in-the-night-time-in-london.html
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