This is my review of Curious Incident from 2013 at the Apollo.  It has since been at the Gielgud and the Piccadilly Theatres and is at the Troubadour Wembley and on tour.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time was a hit novel for Mark Haddon with its analysis of the adventures of a 15 year old boy who has a disorder in the autism spectrum, akin to Asperger’s. Haddon says the novel is not a manual on autism but a book about otherness and how society at large reacts to what is different.

Marianne Elliott and Simon Stephens have turned the novel into a play which I found even more fascinating than the book. After selling out at the Cottesloe at the National Theatre, it has thankfully transferred to the Apollo in the West End. The play is charming and beautifully staged by Bunny Christie on a black and white grid on three sides and the floor, to draw on with chalk, or to illuminate with seemingly endless lighting possibilities.

Christopher Boone (Luke Treadaway) is visited and questioned by the police investigating the gruesome death by garden fork of the dog belonging to his next door neighbour. The police are patronising and long suffering when faced with Christopher’s wonderful retention of strange facts and his insistence on precise detail. Christopher speaks his own words but his thoughts are usually voiced by Niamh Cusack as Siobhan, Christopher’s teacher at the special school he attends. Christopher is candid and often unintentionally amusing as he describes truths that the rest of us shy away from because they might be tactless or hurtful or just too frank. We track back two years into the past and Christopher’s recalls how his mother Judy (Holly Aird) “went into hospital” and later his father Ed (Seàn Gleeson) told him that “she had died”.

Christopher is a talented mathematician and fascinated by theorems and prime numbers. The numbers and lights are projected to show Christopher’s mental activity. There are situations which he finds difficult to handle, confusion and crowds, and all the other actors will physically convey Christopher’s agitation in a choreographic cacophony. Two of Frantic Assembly‘s team, Scott Graham and Steven Hoggett are the movement directors and their imaginative physical work greatly adds to the complexity of interpretation. Christopher finds some unopened letters from his mother who he had thought was dead which throw him into a state of consternation, and while his mother reads her letters to him, Christopher single-mindedly builds a miniature train track layout while papers rain down and the letters are projected on the walls.