A curious mind on a curious stage
How do you translate a novel written from the perspective of a boy with autism into a stage play? Jack van Beynen finds out.
If Christopher John Francis Boone sees five red cars in a row on the way to school, he knows it’s going to be a Super Good Day. Four yellow cars in a row make it a Black Day. On Black Days, Christopher won’t talk to anyone and eats lunch by himself.
He is 15 years old and likes Minesweeper, prime numbers, Sherlock Holmes stories and his pet rat Toby. He does not like metaphors, being touched by other people and the colour brown.
Christopher is autistic, and he’s the main character in Auckland Theatre Company’s latest production, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, where he’ll be played by actor Tim Earl.
Based on the prize-winning 2003 novel by English author Mark Haddon and adapted by his fellow Brit Simon Stephens, the play follows Christopher as he investigates the mysterious murder of his neighbour’s dog. The investigation uncovers dark secrets about his own family that shatter his carefully ordered idea of the world.
Haddon’s book, which is written in Christopher’s firstperson perspective, has been widely praised for the way it takes the reader inside Christopher’s unique brain.
Replicating that on stage is one of the production’s biggest challenges. How do you show the audience how Christopher’s mind works?
To pull it off, director Sara Brodie turned to multimedia artist Tim Gruchy and veteran set designer John Verryt.
They have pooled their talents to create an unusual and innovative set that aims to show the audience the special ways Christopher’s brain operates.
Although the actual stage is yet to be built, Verryt has built a scale model to help him work out what the audience will see. And in the company’s Dominion Road rehearsal space, there’s a fullsize mock-up for the cast to practise with.
A grid of masking tape is stuck to the floor, dividing it into squares like a Minesweeper grid – not coincidentally, Christopher’s favourite game. Fitting into the squares are about a dozen wooden cubes. These are rearranged in each scene, stacked on top of each other, and opened to access the props hidden inside. In the real stage, more cubes will hang from the ceiling and Gruchy’s images and patterns will be projected onto them.
‘‘We kept the actual stage space quite simple, although I did give the designer the idea of a puzzle and we went from there,’’ director Brodie says. ‘‘There’s a lot of quick-changing scenes, so we needed to keep the space really flexible, and so a simple, fluid design that we could paint AV over quickly and change at the drop of a hat was what we were after.’’
In an early scene in the play, at a police station, Christopher is asked to take everything out of his pockets. He takes out a swiss army knife with 13 attachments, a piece of string, a piece of a wooden puzzle, three pellets of rat food, £1.47 in coins, a red paper clip and a key for the front door. He lays his possessions on the table in a perfect grid pattern, and every time the officer moves an object or examines it, he shifts it back into place.
‘‘The set for me is reflecting that precision and that analytical kind of thinking that Christopher’s brain goes through. So we divided it into a grid pattern, and he moves in a grid pattern, interprets everything in patterns, shapes and forms,’’ set designer Verryt says.
For most of the play, the actors move like chess pieces around the grid on the floor, and the cubes are arranged to fit it. But when things get out of control – when Christopher catches a train to London, for example – people and things stop fitting within the grid. ‘‘As soon as things go off-grid, he panics,’’ Verryt says.
His design was partly inspired by Tetris, one of Christopher’s favourite games. He also referenced the book’s illustrations, which are supposed to have been drawn by Christopher based on grid patterns.
Another major influence on the design was the fact the company is performing the play in the round, with the audience seated on all four sides of the stage.
That’s created a particular challenge for AV designer Gruchy. Not only is his work being projected onto a complex, multifaceted surface – it also needs to be visible from every angle.
‘‘The fantastic design of John creates a very interesting challenge for me, because it’s a three-dimensional set that is viewed in the round, so I have to map the video in a very complex way to create the technical solution, and then conceptually I have to think a lot about that too,’’ he says.
Luckily for Gruchy, it’s the kind of challenge he relishes. Like Christopher, he loves maths and solving puzzles.
‘‘I also have a personal interest in, or propensity for, mathematics. Without numbers, there is nothing,’’ he says.
‘‘I’ve worked a lot with mathematical visualisation software for many years . . . so I’ve been drawing from my vast library of mathematically generated material, and utilising that and manipulating it and changing it, and that’ll be part of the imagining of what’s in Christopher’s head.’’
It’s not as simple as giving the audience images of what Christopher is thinking. The idea, Gruchy says, is not to distract the audience from the actors with flashy pictures. Instead, abstract patterns generated with mathematical formulae and strings of numbers feature heavily.
‘‘Most video is designed for people to watch, I’m actually designing perhaps more for people to feel and evoke the sense of what’s in Christopher’s head.’’
‘‘I don’t think audiences should respond to the video, I think they should respond to the whole production. And if we’re all doing our jobs well and working as a good team, which I think we are, then the outcome is about the totality of the performance and the audience should come away feeling that rather than ‘Oh wow, the video was cool’.’’
Not everyone involved in the production has Gruchy’s aptitude for maths, however. Director Brodie confesses all the maths has given her a bit of a headache.
‘‘All our heads are spinning. Most of us aren’t maths wizards, I’m certainly not, so we’re doing things like ‘Actor one move to K2’,’’ she says.
But then again, not everyone is like Christopher.