The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time: From Page to Stage

WOMAN READS: "My name is Christopher John Francis Boone."

The story of Curious Incident is a story about Christopher Boone,

a 15-year-old boy, who finds a dog with a fork through it

in his neighbour's front garden one evening when he's out for a walk.

"It was seven minutes after midnight.

"The dog was lying in the grass in the middle of the lawn in front

-"of Mrs Shears' house."

-Get away from my dog!

By following clues and finding things in his house,

he goes on a journey to London.

-Single or return?

-What does "single or return" mean?

And discovers his mother, who he thought was dead, is still alive.

-Where's your father, Christopher?

-I think he's in Swindon.

His whole family life in his head changes,

from what he thought his family life was to the reality of it.

Father said you were dead.

What?

He said you went into hospital because you had something

wrong with your heart and then you had a heart attack and died.

Oh, my God.

Everybody who reads this book falls in love with the way

Christopher thinks, and the detail and the wit

and the clarity with which Christopher sees the world.

-I have a rat.

-Rat?!

-He's called Toby.

-Oh!

Most people don't like rats

because they think they carry diseases like bubonic plague,

but that's only because they lived in sewers

and stowed away on ships coming from foreign countries where there

were strange diseases, but rats are very clean.

Doing an adaptation of a very well-known book or film

in the theatre is risky, because people come expecting what

they'd remembered or how they'd imagined it.

My way into interpreting Christopher was being very loyal to

Mark Haddon and just really sticking to what he'd written in the novel.

Maybe I could bring some tea out here! Do you like lemon squash?

-I only like orange squash.

-Luckily, I have some of that as well.

Oh, and what about Battenberg?

I don't know because I don't know what Battenberg is.

One of Mark Haddon's great geniuses is that he writes

brilliant direct speech.

A lot of novelists use dialogue as a means of releasing back-story

or a means of getting characters to say how they're feeling,

and Mark never does that.

-Where have you been?

-I have been out.

I just had a phone call from Mrs Shears.

What the hell were you doing, poking round her garden?

I was doing detective work, trying to figure out who killed Wellington.

Every time Mark attributes direct speech to a character, it's because

they very much want to affect other people they are talking to.

I know you told me not to get involved in other people's

business, but Mrs Shears is a friend of ours.

She's not a friend any more.

The first thing I did, was really simple,

was I went through the novel, and every time a character spoke,

I typed that out to create a very,

very rough sketch of a draft of a play.

-Have you got a ticket?

-No.

Well, how, precisely, do you expect to get to London then?!

Another thing that I did, was I went through the book

and just listed all the events that happened.

-WOMAN READS:

-"Mother died two years ago."

"I came home from school one day and no-one answered the door,

"so I went and found the secret key that we keep under a flower

"pot outside the kitchen window."

One of the challenges of the book

was that Mark's very playful with time.

He goes backwards and forwards in time, and he's unpredictable

about when he's going to go forwards and when he's going to go

backwards, and that presents challenges to the dramatist.

"An hour later, father came home from work."

-Christopher, have you seen your mum?

-Nope.

"He went downstairs and started making some phone calls."

I was faced with the possibility of re-ordering the chronology

and going right from the beginning to the end of the story,

and for a while, I really thought about doing that.

I decided in the end that would be a mistake.

I'm afraid you won't be seeing your mother for a while.

Why not?

Your mother has had to go into hospital.

I think the reason Mark plays with chronology is because he wants to

create a more truthful perception of what it's actually like to

feel like Christopher Boone.

"The next day was Saturday,

"and there was not much to do on a Saturday

"unless Father takes me out somewhere on an outing

"to the boating lake or to the garden centre."

Mark Haddon deliberately didn't explain or describe who

Christopher was, but everything is seen through Christopher's

eyes in a very gentle way.

I think I would make a very good astronaut.

I think theatre can only ever be in the third person.

Mark's great genius was creating a first person voice that people

could really relate to. The stage doesn't work like that.

What I had to do was to find a way of making Christopher's voice

dramatic, so making that voice about somebody behaving,

and the way into that was through Siobhan.

"The word 'metaphor' means carrying something

"from one place to another."

Siobhan is, in the book, she is Christopher's teacher,

and I think a very good teacher.

She then, in the play, becomes the narrator for some of the time.

"The first main reason is that people do a lot of talking

"without using any words."

I made the decision that Siobhan should be

the narrator of Christopher's book.

It was important that Christopher's narration is revealed somehow, but

I didn't want to break the rules of Mark's book, and one of the

rules of Mark's book is that Siobhan gets to read Christopher's book.

This is good, Christopher! It's quite exciting.

She gets stuff that Christopher doesn't get,

and the book works for us as a reader,

because we get stuff that Christopher doesn't get,

and she's the bridge through that dramatic irony.

"There was no-one else near me for thousands and thousands of miles!"

She's a really invaluable dramatic character.

For me she became the fulcrum of the entire adaptation.

"And I put my hands round the sides of my face so I can't see the fence

"or the chimney or the washing line, and I can pretend I'm in space!"

ORCHESTRAL SWELL

"My name is Christopher John Francis Boone.

"I know all the countries of the world and their capital cities,

"and every prime number up to 7,507."

Christopher Boone is a remarkable human being.

He has a massive imagination

and a massive comprehension of the universe and science and maths.

Then, they worked out the universe was expanding,

that all the stars were rushing away from one another after the Big Bang.

The further the stars were away from us, the faster they were moving,

some of them nearly as fast as the speed of light.

Things like numbers and maths

and sciences are definite concrete things which he can understand.

-I bet you're very good at maths, aren't you?

-I am.

I'm going to take A-level maths next month

-and I'm going to get an A*.

-Really? A-level maths?

-Yes.

Christopher is incredibly sharp in some ways,

but in other ways he's quite immature, I suppose, or undeveloped.

I have a grandson your age.

My age is 15 years and three months and three days.

Well, almost your age.

He's never been outside of his street on his own ever.

He goes to school on a school bus that picks him up

and drops him off at home.

In the bus on the way to school we passed four red cars in a row.

-Four?!

-So today is a good day.

-Great. I am glad.

Humans are very puzzling to him whereas animals aren't, which is

why he's very upset about the dog's death at the top of the show.

He understands animals, he doesn't understand humans.

I don't always do what I'm told.

Why?

Because when people tell you what to do, it is usually confusing

and does not make sense.

For example, people often say "be quiet",

but they don't tell you how long to be quiet for.

He finds it very hard, for instance, to look at people's faces

because he finds facial expressions very hard to understand.

"Siobhan says that if you raise one eyebrow it can mean

"lots of different things.

"It can mean, 'I want to do sex with you'." I never said that!

-Yes, you did!

-I didn't use those WORDS, Christopher.

Yes, you did, on September 12, last year at first break.

Part of my job role is working with people on the autistic spectrum,

and Christopher demonstrates quite a number of characteristics

of the autistic spectrum.

So, for example, he finds it very difficult to be touched,

and he can't predict when somebody's going to do something

and therefore it becomes a shock.

He needs routine, and if something changes, that makes him very anxious.

I think there's someone out there on the platform looking for you.

-I know.

-Well, it's your look out.

-103, 107, 109, 113.

He has a relationship with maths.

It's what he finds comforting, it's what he turns to

when he's stressed, I suppose a bit like a comforting blanket.

-223, 227, 229.

-Coming!

We all did a lot of research, actually,

about the condition that Christopher might have.

We went to various schools and talked to various teachers

and talked to a lot of kids who had Asperger's syndrome.

I'd go in and speak to the kids or watch from the back of a classroom

as they were having an art class, and that was just so useful to me.

Everybody is so individual on that spectrum,

that our job, really, was to be true to Christopher,

what was happening for Christopher and what was right for him.

This water, this rain, has evaporated, actually,

from somewhere like maybe...the Gulf of Mexico maybe,

or Baffin Bay, and now it has fallen in front of the house,

and then it will drain in the gutter and then it will flow to a sewage

station where it will be cleaned, and then it will go into a river

and then it will go back into the ocean again.

One of the challenges that I faced

was developing Christopher's character.

For me, that came not necessarily through what Christopher was

saying, but what the characters were doing to one another.

Sharing your life with other actual human beings.

By watching Ed Boone, for example, who is Christopher's Dad,

share a space with Christopher,

and the way Ed moves and the way Ed behaves around him,

by showing how difficult it is for Ed to touch Christopher,

just those little physical moments allow us

an insight into Christopher that Christopher can't allow us

into because he can't identify those emotional experiences.

I think Christopher's character does change throughout the book.

-WOMAN'S VOICE:

-Please use assistant's phone opposite,

right of the ticket office.

The whole process of him going to London and having to be brave

and having to overcome that most terrifying of journeys, I think,

leaves him at the end, especially when he gets his A-level result,

I think it leaves him thinking that, actually, you know what?

Anything is possible, and going on that huge journey to

London, I think, has been something which has given him courage.

-I got an A*.

-Ooh! Oh! That's just...

-That's terrific, Christopher!

-Yes.

AUDIENCE LAUGHTER

-Aren't you happy?

-Yes, it's the best result.

-I know it is.

-What do you fancy for chow tonight?

-Baked beans and broccoli.

Yeah, I think that can be very easily arranged.

He's a hard-working, loving father, although he has difficulty, I think,

translating that into how you might expect a father to love their son.

Going to put those shelves up in the living room

if that's all right with you.

I'll make a bit of a racket, I'm afraid, so if you want to

watch the television, we're going to have to shift it upstairs.

-I'll go and be on my own in my room.

-Ah-ha, good man.

Ed's got in his mind that he's a single dad

and he's going to do this.

He's trying to enjoy his son who he can't communicate,

he can't hold him, can't play football with him,

can't enjoy him as maybe the son he thought he would have.

They do still have a relationship where

they still know how to communicate affection the little that they

can by the touching of fingertips.

I could see the Milky Way as we drove towards the town centre.

He loves his son so he'll make it the best he can.

So, he's running a business, holding down a home, looking after

Christopher, and I think that's all fairly straightforward until now.

How many times do I have to tell you, Christopher?

Keep your nose out of other people's business!

I think Mr Shears probably killed Wellington.

I will not have that man's named MENTIONED IN MY HOUSE!

Christopher's relationship with his dad is quite strained,

probably not unlike a lot of 15-year-old boys with their fathers,

and he's going through puberty and his hormones are raging.

Why not?

And he also has Asperger's,

so there's kind of more challenges on top of that as well.

I asked you to do one thing for me, Christopher, ONE THING!

I didn't want to talk to Mrs Alexander! If Mrs... Ah!

The relationship is kind of more volatile,

because Ed, I think,

feels he needs to close this down and regain control,

because in order for Ed to survive and keep things manageable,

he has to have control, is how he feels.

No!

You do see him hit Christopher. He's obviously a volatile man.

As the play, or the book, develops, they come to a crisis point,

I suppose, and it comes to a head and it explodes in a horrible way.

When he finds out that his mother was still alive,

and all these letters that his dad's been hiding from him,

then that changes everything.

I don't know what to say. I...

I was in such a mess.

I said she was in hospital because I didn't know how to explain,

it was so complicated, and...

Once I said it I couldn't change it, it just...

HE SMIRKS

I think Ed did that, not just selfishly

because of the humiliation of the mother having had an affair and

leaving, but how do you explain that to an autistic boy,

that their mother can't be there any more because she can't do it?

So apart from his own anger and frustration...

..with the mother, I think it was also to cushion the boy.

But it's just turned into an ugly mess.

I'm going to have to touch you, but...

..it's going to be all right.

I don't believe that he's a malicious man.

I think he's a frustrated man and a wounded man.

For me it was really important that Ed wasn't a bad guy.

He was a human, he was struggling, he was doing his best.

Sometimes he did a really, really bad job as a father,

but, you know, every father who's ever lived, at times,

has done a really bad job at being a father.

You also see a bit of evolution afterwards,

cos I think you see Ed coming round to understanding that this

isn't just a lad he needs to control,

and he finds new respect for him and a love for him that's open,

and he tries to live more mutually with him.

Now, you have to learn to trust me and...

I don't care how long it takes,

if it's a minute one day and two minutes the next and three minutes

the next, if it takes years, I don't care, because this is important.

This is more important than anything else.

"Mother died, two years ago."

"I came home from school one day and no-one answered the door."

Christopher hasn't seen his mum in two years,

and he has been told that his mum died of a heart attack.

So the very first time we hear about the mum is in a memory that he

has before she died, when he was at a beach in Cornwall.

-Christopher!

-Mother said...

Over here! Christopher! Look! It's lovely!

And she jumped backwards and disappeared under the water,

and I thought a shark had eaten her and I screamed.

And then she stood up out of the water

and came over to where I was standing

and held up her right hand and spread out her fingers like a fan.

Come on, Christopher. Touch my hand.

They had a really good relationship.

Then she obviously went through a period of sort of depression,

I think, and not coping very well with having a young boy with

autism, and she left.

Because I often thought I couldn't take it any more.

And your father is really patient but I'm not.

I get cross even though I don't mean to.

So he's not known about what she's been doing for the last two years.

Dear Christopher...

I'm sorry it's been such a very long time

since I wrote my last letter to you.

The audience meets Judy through her letters.

You only know this woman through her words.

Also, we've moved into a new flat at last,

as you can see from the address.

It's not as nice as the old one, and I don't like Willesden very much,

but it's easier for Roger to get to work.

I think the relationship between Judy and Christopher is probably

more complex than a lot of mother-son relationships.

You haven't written to me yet,

so I know that you are probably still angry with me.

I'm sorry, Christopher.

But I still love you.

I hope you don't stay angry with me for ever,

and I'd love it if you were able to write me a letter.

She is a mother who can't cope and who takes an opportunity to

get herself out of the family situation when it arises.

And now...

I have...lots of time.

She then has to deal with he overwhelming guilt

and shame that she feels for having left her son.

I was not a very...

..good mother, Christopher.

Maybe if things had been different...

Maybe if you'd been...

..different, I might have been better at it.

Left, right, left, right, left, right...

There comes the point where Christopher arrives in London.

You weren't in so I waited for you.

When she first sees him, she wants to grab him and hold him,

that's her instinct and you see that happen on stage,

and he just pushes her away.

-Christopher!

-Uh!

And I think that's the main difficulty, that in a sense,

she has to sit back on a natural maternal instinct

and try to be less emotional, but she's a very emotional woman.

-Where's your father, Christopher?

-I think he's in Swindon.

Thank God for that.

-How did you get here?

-I came on the train.

Oh, my God, Christopher, I didn't think...

Why are you here on your own?

When they meet it should be perfect

and there's a moment for Judy where she thinks maybe

it is going to be perfect.

Will you let me help you get your clothes off?

I can get you a clean T-shirt and you can get yourself into bed.

But then, of course, there's the reality of this boy

being in this different life with her and Roger in London,

and it falls apart very, very quickly.

Christopher, if you drink 200 mil then I'm going to put a bronze star

on your chart.

-I don't believe this!

-Roger, for God's sake, please.

If you drink 400 mil, then you get a silver star.

ROGER LAUGHS

And if you drink 600 mil, you get...

A gold star!

Well, that's very original, I have to say.

Roger, stop it.

You're not helping!

You see Judy realised that the only choice she has, in actual fact, is

to go back home and be with her son,

and find a way to look after Christopher.

Right, you come downstairs...

you bring Toby, and you get into the car.

-Into Mr Shears' car?

-That's right.

-Are you stealing the car?

I'm just borrowing it.

-Where are we going?

-Going home.

What you've written so far is just...

-Well, it's great.

-It's very short.

-Well, some very good books are very short.

-Like what?

Like...

-Like Heart Of Darkness.

-Who wrote heart of darkness?

-Joseph Conrad.

'Siobhan is, I think, a very good teacher,'

she...gets him in a way that probably nobody else does.

I think Christopher's relationship with Siobhan is probably the

most important in the book, and she is, for him,

a kind of guiding light, really.

Father said I was never to mention Mr Shears' name in our house again

and that he was an evil man,

and maybe that meant he was the person who killed Wellington.

Christopher, I think you should do what your father tells you to do.

We decided, for dramatic purposes, that Siobhan had only

entered his life after his mother had so-called "died".

Red cars in a row.

'The first proper scene between them

'is just after he's brought up the fact in the story that

'his mother had died, so someone else steps into the role, in a way.'

Who's Wellington?

Wellington is a dog that used to belong to my neighbour,

Mr Shears, but he is dead now because somebody killed him

by putting a garden fork through him, and I found him,

then a policeman came and thought I'd killed him, but I hadn't.

Then he tried to touch me so I hit him

and I had to go to the police station.

She properly does love Christopher, really love him.

But she knows that she is no use to him, really,

if she allows that to take over.

She's got to be a really good teacher

'and that means also being a little bit removed

'because she needs to really be able to look at his future

'and look at his life and see what he's capable of

'and what he's not.'

Well, we're meant to be writing stories today.

'She's very honest with him.'

She, I think, respects him, and she talks to him like a human being.

I can help you.

Will you help me with the spelling and the grammar and the footnotes?

She then, in the play, becomes the narrator for some of the time.

"I counted out the letters.

"There were 43 of them.

"They were all addressed to me in the same handwriting."

And then she gets so in tune with him that she actually becomes him

at times.

I think I would make a very good astronaut.

Yes, mate, you probably would.

To be a good astronaut you have to be intelligent, and I'm intelligent.

'I would like to describe her as his soul, or his imagination.'

And I'm good at understanding how machines work.

'I think the big challenge for Siobhan, in the play, is

'finding out exactly when she's Siobhan,

'when she's the narrator, and when she's Christopher,

'and making very definite choices about that.'

Well, I could pretend I'm in space!

And all I could see would be stars and stars are the places where the

molecules that life is made of were constructed billions of years ago!

For me, it's a novel about how you live with other people.

It's about family, it's about love,

it's about how you articulate love, it's about the importance

of being honest, it's about the difficulty of truthfulness.

Your mother has died.

She's had a heart attack.

'Is lying ever kind?'

Is it ever cruel to tell the truth,

or actually is being truthful the most human

and the most important thing that we can do to one another?

I don't know what to say. I...

I was in such a mess, I said she was in hospital

because I didn't know how to explain it, it was complicated.

It's a story about family, it's a story about parenting,

and about being a child, and I think the family in this show,

and all the characters in this try really hard to survive in not

always the easiest world.

This is my house too, in case you've forgotten.

-What, is your fancy man here as well?

-Don't do that!

CHRISTOPHER DRUMS AND CHANTS

It is about difference and about how different we are

in seeing life from different perspectives.

The way Mark Haddon has done that quite fantastically is to go to

a perspective that we don't normally get

and have the main protagonist be autistic Asperger's.

I like looking at the rain.

Terrific.

I like it because it makes me

-think how all the water in the world is connected.

-Does it?

This water, this rain, has evaporated actually from somewhere

like maybe the Gulf of Mexico, or maybe Baffin Bay,

and now it has fallen in front of the house

and then it will drain into the gutter,

and then it will float to a sewage station, where it will be cleaned,

and then into a river and then back into the ocean again.

It relates to a lot of us all the time, I think.

We all spend many hours of our lives feeling perplexed by why other

people are behaving in a way that they are behaving.

73, 79, 83...

Argh!

..89, 97.

You scared the life out of me, can I just get my bag?

And it's a very humanist way of looking at those moments.

Reverend Peters is going to invigilate.

It's only an exam, I can ring the school.

We can get it postponed, you can take it some other time.

I can't take it some other time, it's been arranged!

'You look at Christopher and you enter his world'

and you understand it and it's not so different to our world.

'Yes, he has lots of difficulties,

'but we can all relate to some of those difficulties.'

I wonder if you can understand any of this.

I know it will be difficult for you.

I thought what I was doing was the best for all of us.

'Everybody is desperately trying to understand each other,'

and obviously Christopher is an extreme version of that

because he finds communication quite difficult.

I want to go to London.

-Single or return?

-What does "single or return" mean?

Do you want to go one way or do you want to come back?

I want to stay there when I get there.

The story that we're watching is the story of a family.

'And most families have times where it's difficult for them'

to communicate, look after each other, be truthful with each other.

It will get better, I promise. Now, you don't

have to say anything, not right now, but you have to think about it.

I suppose that's what the book and the play reminds us of.

I said that I wanted to explain to you why I went away.

'The audience meets Judy through her letters'

so you only know this woman through her words.

Now I have...lots of time.

When you read the letters in the book

it could be quite flat because it's just the written word.

When you put a human being into those letters

and you have her walk on stage and be in the same space as her son,

'you can see what it costs her to write those letters.'

So I'm sitting on the sofa here with this letter and the radio on, and...

..I'm going to try and explain.

'The tension's building because although they are not speaking'

to each other, he's coming closer to his real mother on stage,

saying this letter.

That became very interesting - that he's getting physically

nearer to her with this train track, not looking at her,

engrossed in the train track.

You grabbed the chopping board, threw it,

and it hit my foot and broke my toe.

'So it was highly emotional.'

I couldn't walk properly for a month. Do you remember?

And your father had to look after you.

And I remember looking at the two of you and seeing you together

and thinking how you were really different with him.

-Much calmer.

-It made me so sad.

Because it was like you didn't need me at all!

'It's a real build. Those moments of intensity, for me,'

were about the characters all inhabiting the same space,

seemingly not communicating,

but being more honest and open than they ever could be in real life.

-He's really angry.

-He said I couldn't talk to you!

And I didn't know what to do!

He said I was being selfish

and that I was never to set foot inside the house again!

In a book that is about dishonesty and betrayal, and death and love

and thwarted love, I think what you really need is a bit of playfulness.

Where is 451c Chapter Road, London, NW2 5NG?

LAUGHTER

A-Z of London, £2.95, are going to buy it or not?

I think that is what brings to play to life, really. You can't have

a whole play or a whole book where it's tense and it's horrible

and it's depressing because no-one is going to care about

any of the characters.

I'm going to say something to you

and you must promise not to tell your father that I told you this.

You have to make people laugh

and you have to make people enjoy themselves and enjoy the characters

they're watching otherwise they won't care about

the dramatic moments.

Your mother, before she died, was very good friends with Mr Shears.

-I know.

-No, Christopher, I'm not sure that you do know.

I mean, they were VERY good friends.

Very, very good friends.

Do you mean they were doing sex?

Yes, Christopher, that is what I mean.

I think because my adaptation was very loyal to the book,

a lot of the comedy that underpins the tragedy comes

directly from Mark's writing, it comes from his dialogue,

it comes from his observations.

I think maybe what I brought to it was

a sense of the playfulness of the theatricality.

Get the Tube to Willesden Junction or Willesden Green,

it's got to be near there somewhere.

What is a Tube?

LAUGHTER

Are you for real?

It takes the audience a bit of time before they realise

they're allowed to laugh, between it being very sad

and very emotional and very tense, and other times when it's quite

quirky and fun because Christopher sees things in a different way.

You see the big staircase with the escalator?

I think the comedy comes from Christopher's very logical way

of looking at the world and...

I mean, one of the things Christopher says is

when he's asking Reverend Peters where heaven is.

It's another kind of place altogether.

There isn't anything outside our universe, Reverend Peters,

there isn't another kind of place altogether.

'Nearly all of the laughs, every night on stage,'

they're really, very rarely, coming from someone trying to be funny.

They are coming from places of misunderstanding between two

people or people's points of view being completely at crossroads.

If heaven was on the other side of a black hole then dead people

would have to be fired into space on a rocket to get there

and they aren't or people would notice.

LAUGHTER

I think physical theatre is a very dynamic way of exploring

a subtext within any kind of context.

If you think of everyday life, people just sitting opposite each other

talking, there are the words, but there's also the body language.

And that's just at a naturalistic level.

It actually embraces a whole range of dynamic choreography.

It can explode into dance.

It just shows, often, what's existing underneath - the aches,

the desires, the needs, that aren't expressed verbally.

I asked Scott and Steve to get involved

because I knew it would be very physical

and because we wanted to make it emotional and poetic,

and interesting, without it being realistic.

So that means that we show things in a way that is physical rather

than somebody actually walks through the door, or puts

the key in the door, and opens it and puts the key on the side.

You actually do something which is much more gestural.

I let myself into the house and wiped my feet on the mat.

I put my keys in the bowl on the table and I took my coat off and

hung it by the side the fridge so it would be ready for school

the next day.

It's always helpful when a writer is prepared to be very ambitious.

Simon really wanted that immediacy and economy that physicality

could provide, and he didn't want to go into a whole world of exposition.

I waited for nine more minutes but nobody else came past,

and the train was really quiet

and I did not move again, so I knew the train had stopped.

Because we're dealing with a very particular mind,

what Mark Haddon does brilliantly is take his reader into that mind...

There is a village in the distance which has 31 visible houses...

..and so this production had to bring this audience into the mind

of Christopher Boone so we had to see the world from his point of view.

And know that there was no-one else near me for thousands

and thousands of miles.

'Finding that physical language, which is slightly topsy-turvy,'

is a wonderful sort of way of transmitting the kind of mind

'that Christopher has, which is brilliant

'and a very imaginative mind.'

And one of them was mother.

You've got to be really bold and quite brave

because when someone is saying to you "be a chair" or "a light",

you do feel to begin with that you're looking slightly foolish.

But because everybody was doing the language it works.

What happens with that is that you then are seeing the world, hopefully,

through Christopher's eyes.

"I switched on my bedroom light and played six games of Tetris

"and got to level 38 which is my fourth best ever score."

I knew that the boy playing Christopher would need to be

a very physical actor and be able to express things

physically in a way, again, that he possibly can't articulate verbally.

As an actor, he's got to be in control of every moment

of his physicality on stage and Luke embraced that.

It is a surprisingly difficult thing to achieve quite simple

movements because they have to be very exact,

and it has to be properly thought out,

it has to be on exactly the right beat.

One of the brilliant things about having Frantic

on board was that they were able to bring some very pragmatic

solutions to quite particular problems - getting

from Swindon to Paddington train station.

It was awful to read on the page. It was just a list of words.

It's just advertising slogans

and what's overheard here and there.

-Sweet Pastries.

-Heathrow Airport, check-in here.

-Bagel Factory.

My instinct, I think, initially, was it's not going to work.

We had to resist getting lost in the randomness of the words.

Excellence and Taste.

When we first started learning some of the physical sequences,

it was surprising how hard it was, it was a lot of practice.

There's just the sequence where we walk around Swindon and Christopher

is feeling out of his depth because everyone else seems to be in step.

Just those simple moves, everything's on a beat of five

and constantly turning, it looks easy.

It was horrendously difficult to actually get in our bodies

so that you can do it without looking like you're counting

or worried about crashing into somebody behind you.

-Stationlink.

-Buses.

-WH Smith.

-Mezzanine.

That scene could have been a disaster.

We had to really focus on him and appreciate what it must be like,

how terrifying to have that sensory overload.

And what you have at the end of it is like an odyssey, you know.

He's completely exhausted.

-Here, get up, man.

-Oh!

And it seems absolutely right because this was never

a journey for someone like us, this was a journey for a boy who's

never left Swindon, who sees the world in a very, very different way.

Right, left, right, left, right, left, right...

There's a huge amount of characters in the play.

I think probably there's something like 30 different characters.

Many of whom say one thing.

-59, 61...

-Oh!

'There's a pragmatic question'

about how do you cast that?

You could get 30 different actors,

but I became quite excited by the notion of creating

an ensemble of different characters

and creating the possibility of the audience seeing actors take on

and take off different hats and take on and take off different characters.

-He could be our elf mascot!

-Come on!

When you've got the same actor who plays the Reverend Peters...

Well, it isn't actually in our universe...

..playing a policeman...

Don't even... Look...

'..that's quite playful. 'It's quite silly, it's quite fun.'

Park yourself!

'I think what you really need is a bit of playfulness.

'And it's something we brought to the theatricality

'by creating the ensemble.'

Christopher!

'Because you're part of the ensemble,'

there was never a moment when you

felt you weren't involved in the piece.

You're on stage pretty much the whole time and you have a challenge,

which is flipping very quickly from one person to the next.

You have to make a very quick impression with

each of the characters.

'Some of them only appear for a matter of moments.'

Through the underpass and up the stairs. You'll see the signs!

It always felt slightly strange to be looking at Christopher on the train.

For me, I found it quite hard thinking, "What am I now?

"I'm not his mother now, I'm just someone on a train."

Most other people are lazy. They never look at everything.

They do what is called glancing.

What we are creating is scenes that are recognisable by a group

of actors all working together to create a moment.

If we all just march along in the same way, it would

not be as effective. So you make choices.

On the train I decide that my character would listen to

headphones, so I'm listening to music on the train.

When I'm in the street I'm perhaps slightly aggressive because I'm late.

So you have to make choices to make those ensemble characters live

and be as real as you can, even though you're really

a part of what could be a crowd.

And that's how you make it effective.

They have to click in and click out of scenes,

so you can see them sitting on the side as an ensemble member,

just focusing the previous scene.

And then they stand up and they are in the middle of a very,

very emotional scene as their character.

That's hard to do.

Judy, look, I'm sorry, OK?

You should have thought about that

before you made me look a complete idiot.

I think the stylised, ensemble nature of this production is...

is important, because it's all

about Christopher's take on the world.

Nothing really exists unless Christopher wants it to.

So the company will be chaos.

They will be flitting around until Christopher focuses

and they will snap into position.

Right...

Is this London?

They represent his thoughts and they can be chaotic

and they can be absolutely pure and linear and precise,

whatever state of mind he is in.

I knew the station was somewhere near.

And if something is near you can find it by moving in a spiral.

Walking in a clockwise direction, taking every right turn

until you come to a road you've already walked on.

'The design had to be a piece of imagination.'

The more realistic you made it, the more domestic and clunky and...

..heavy it felt. It has to be light and agile and highly imaginative.

Over here! Christopher! Look!

'Very early on,'

we talked quite a lot about setting it

as if it's in the school hall of the school that Christopher is at.

Because quite a lot of the scenes happen at Christopher's school.

And then quite quickly, when Marianne and I were working on it,

we wanted to make it more abstract than that, so we wanted to make it

as if we were inside Christopher's head,

as if we were in his imagination.

In order for that to feel comfortable for Christopher,

it was clear that had to be somewhere that was very ordered

and very clean and mathematical.

Show that a triangle with sides can be written in the form n2 + 1...

'When I was doing the design, I went and bought the A-level papers

'and took a lot of the diagrams'

and the grids and looked at some of the questions.

So a lot of the design came directly from A-level maths.

Siobhan says that

if you raise one eyebrow it can mean lots of different things.

'The design was on two levels.'

One was, in the book he describes himself as being a little bit

like Sherlock Holmes, in that his brain was

a bit like a laboratory in which he could come to some sort of solution.

So that was very much how I decided to design the show,

like a laboratory of his brain.

And the other thing was that the first half of the show

is like a kind of whodunit, because that's what his book is initially.

So we also wanted to make the design a bit like an incident board

in a crime room in a police station.

I only know one person who didn't like Mrs Shears and that is

Mr Shears, who divorced Mrs Shears and went to live somewhere else.

And who knew Wellington very well indeed.

This means Mr Shears is my prime suspect.

'It's used like a bit of graph paper, actually.'

So the projections that are projected onto it are his diagrams,

or his workings out.

Inside Christopher's head, we can go anywhere then,

so we can shoot of into the atmosphere, amongst the stars.

So the set really had to be able to be lots of different places

and feel like lots of different places.

"Because imagining an apple in someone's eye doesn't have

"anything to do with liking someone a lot."

'He jumps timelines, so he goes back and forth in time.'

I'm sorry.

And he goes from one scene and jump-cuts to the middle of another scene.

And we needed to do that in a very agile way.

Christopher, I think you should do what your father tells you to do.

-What happened to you the other day?

-Which day?

I came out again and you'd gone. I had to eat all the biscuits myself.

-I went away.

-I gathered that!

If you had a set trundling on of a realistic kitchen

and doing a realistic set

and then the set trundling off and suddenly we are in a garden,

you wouldn't be following him at the speed that his brain goes.

Maybe we should take a little walk in the park together.

This is not the place to be talking about this kind of thing.

'You're really creating an environment

'where the story can be told clearly,'

and that's all got to happen quite fluidly

and poetically in front of people's eyes.

So the whole evening makes sense

and moves the way that the director wants the story to be told.

-I decided to go out on my own.

-THEY GROAN

When you talk about lighting design, really, I felt

the lighting shouldn't describe a place, because the lighting

was just what Christopher saw, and what Christopher saw

I always saw as being very kind of cool, white and controlled.

So we don't use colour or warmth or anything like that.

We are very specific about when places change and when they don't.

BELL RINGS

CHRISTOPHER GRUNTS

Reverend Peters, where is heaven?

'In a way, Curious moves like the inside of Christopher's head,

'so it has to be lots of changes in the lighting all the time,'

because it's as busy as he is.

We talked a lot about it feeling like it's Christopher's brain

and that the company, the rest of the actors who are within that,

are almost like microbes of his brain.

They're like energy systems that are whizzing around

and bouncing off the walls.

So that the whole set has to feel like it's another character.

We designed every scene before we went into rehearsal.

And we did a storyboard with models and photographed every scene.

So we knew how every scene should look and should be staged.

The model box is really, really vital, unlike a computer animation.

When I go and visit the builders, we can pick it up,

we can make things work on it. We've got it in our hands.

We can turn it around, we can look at it as we are working on it.

The painters work directly from the model box.

So they match exactly my colours and design

25 times bigger.

And there's a kind of a kit for the show

and everything that we need to tell the story is there within that kit.

The props are clearly displayed, the actors are clearly displayed.

Some of them never leave the stage.

They are sort of hopefully taking the audience with them

on this highly imaginative, suggestive...

stylised way of telling Christopher's story.

Left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right...

It's interesting how quite often with a show, the way you make

the show and the tools you use are reflected in the sort of show it is.

So with Christopher,

we sort of said that the theatre was like the inside of his head.

When I put my hands around the sides of my face...

'What we wanted to do was put all the things that are available

'to us - video projectors and the lights and things -

'we wanted to make alive in that space.'

LAUGHTER

It's lovely!

And she jumped backwards and disappeared under the water...

'The sound, the lights,'

the music, we all have to be almost orchestrating ourselves together

so that everything we are doing is...

we're all doing the same thing at the same moment.

I spent two or three weeks in rehearsals with Marianne

and the company.

I don't get to do any lighting, but I can watch and I can understand it.

I can track the story that we need to keep alive for the audience.

In the rehearsal room, you don't have all the magic of the lighting

and the projection.

It's just very raw, you know.

And as a composer you have to imagine in your mind's ear

and eye what that's going to translate into.

The brilliant thing about rehearsal is that it's all about trying.

When I'm in rehearsal, what I do is,

I work out where I want all the lighting cues to go

so I'm not wasting time when I'm there looking for it.

Is this train going to London?

I just go, "Right, this is what we're doing.

"Is Mrs Shears up-stage?"

Christopher...

In a way, Curious moves like inside of Christopher's head,

so it has to be lots of changes in the lighting all the time

because it's as busy as he is.

And I could pretend I'm in space!

And all I could see was the stars!

'With a show like this, I think there's a very real danger'

that music could be used to sort of get too sentimental.

It would be so easy just to say we could do some bits of music

that would say how sad it was to be Christopher.

Which would be the wrong thing to do.

Well, we decided it was the wrong thing to do.

One of the things that came about was that Christopher really likes maths.

..Pythagoras's theory...

And machines, and things that he knows he can control.

And so of course that's great

for somebody like me as a composer, because I can pick up on...

"Ah, he likes maths, he likes machines.

"How can we use those concepts to build a score,

"to build a piece of music with?"

Open your paper, Christopher, and you may begin.

And I thought, "Right, we're going to use free computer-y sounds,

"bleeps and that sort of stuff."

STACCATO BEEPING

Two, three, five, seven, eleven.

'One thing we were constantly trying to look for with the play'

was a sense of Christopher controlling things

until they got out of control.

I can help you.

Will you help me with the spelling and the grammar and the footnotes?

And lights moving very carefully and picking things out of darkness.

And then things kind of get too much for him and it becomes less safe.

And visually playing games with that.

Is this train going to Willesden Junction?

I don't necessarily make a shift to do with the emotional temperature.

It's more to do with places where he feels safe and where he doesn't.

I mean, it's interesting when he's in his mother's house.

We put him in a very tight box of light.

And the dark, monsters can come from there, and Mr Shears

being outside, it's finding a way to make the situation make sense.

There are obvious really tense and crucial moments

when he's found the letters.

When he finds out that his dad killed Wellington.

"Father had murdered Wellington! That meant he could murder ME!"

Those are really crucial emotional moments,

and we really did want to make something happen.

Lighting can be like painting.

It can achieve times of day,

it can achieve emotional heightened moments.

It can achieve all sorts of different things.

"I could to make them let me take Toby.

"But if they didn't let me I would still go,

"because it would be a dream come true."

I don't think the audience will ever read that overtly.

I just hope that they are aware that there is a particular...

there is a different atmosphere.

So the book is finished.

You can only kill a dog if A)...

'When we first did the show at the National, we were in the round'

and it was a very small theatre

with the audience completely surrounding us.

A lot of the audience were either on the stage or looking down on it.

So you were looking down on his world,

very much a part of his world.

This means Mr Shears is my prime suspect.

The great thing about being in the round is you don't have to

worry about looking out, you don't need to

worry about where you're facing, so you feel very free as an actor.

What's interesting about that is it feels very real.

The audience felt they were completely in the room with us.

It was very, very intimate.

We could see everybody and we could see the emotion on their faces,

whether they were laughing or crying or shocked or surprised.

-Did you mean to hit the policeman?

-Yes.

He didn't mean to hurt the policeman.

When we went to the West End,

we realised that we were going to transfer into a theatre which was

a proscenium arch, so we were looking at it end-on.

"It can mean, 'I want to do sex with you.'"

I never said that!

-Yes, you did.

-I didn't use those words, Christopher.

-Yes, you did.

On September 12 last year at the first break.

'I think we were all a bit sceptical about whether it would work.

'But then when we really looked at it'

we tried to make a virtue of the fact that actually,

from the audience's point of view in the West End,

you see Christopher and you see him in his box.

So you may not actually be inside it in the same way as you are

when it's staged in the round,

but you are very aware of him in his context.

"I find people confusing."

I found it, as the narrator,

quite difficult to connect with everybody in the auditorium

in the round, because inevitably

there were about 100 people behind me.

So in terms of story-telling,

I find it easier to do it in a bigger space.

"I started by looking in the kitchen.

"Then I detected in the utility room."

'It's rather nice to be able to put Christopher inside his total

'encapsulated world.'

A kind of cube that is the set. It feels very satisfying, I think,

and Christopher is sort of the centre

of that kind of Rubik's Cube of his brain.

We had walls, which we didn't have when we were in the round,

we had a back wall as well and side walls.

We then started to make use of those.

No smoking!

'We recognised that pretty much all the choreography

'would have to change. It was quickly apparent that it was an opportunity'

to make things potentially bigger

and better and to change the focus slightly.

And, going into a bigger venue, it had to be more dynamic.

We were taking the same cast into that new venue,

and they had grown in that time, so they were itching...

They were ready to do something bigger and better,

so it was an absolute joy.

It gives us the ability to do things we couldn't do before -

climbing up walls, jumping off walls, spinning off walls.

There's lots of things which opened up by being proscenium.

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