Belvoir St Theatre, August 22
8/10
Christopher doesn’t do non-verbal communication. Nor does he do metaphors or lying – so he’s deeply suspicious of plays and acting. And he hates being touched so much that he instinctively lashes out at the offender. What he does do is maths and physics. At a high level. At 15 years, three months and two days old.
Christopher can tell if it’s going to be a good day or a bad day by the cars he sees on the way to school: four red cars in a row means a good one; a stream of yellow cars means such a bad day that he’ll have to squat in the corner, put his hands over his ears and groan. Endlessly. Luckily he goes to a special school and has a special teacher, Siobhan, who instils helpful ways to deal with a hostile world, like breathing, counting prime numbers and writing the story of what’s happening to him.
So Christopher just about gets by, until the night when Wellington is killed. With a garden fork. Wellington is – was – a dog belonging to a neighbour, and Christopher likes dogs. He has a rat called Toby because he’s not allowed to have a dog. So when Wellington’s killed, he decides to play detective. “Detecting” as he calls it, is rather like a mathematical puzzle, only it involves people, and people do stuff that’s alien to Christopher: they emote.
Mark Haddon’s vivid novel, adapted for the stage by Simon Stephens and here directed Hannah Goodwin, is written from Christopher’s point of view, so the world is loud, overbearing, irrational and scary. His behavioural difference is not specified, and it is to limit Christopher to define him by labels.
But his first-person voice in the novel is so singular as to create a massive challenge for Stephens: one that, oddly, is not so very different from the problem in dramatising Jane Austen’s works. Austen’s ultimate genius lay in her ironic narration, which is usually the first casualty of any dramatisation. Stephens has tried to solve the problem of Christopher’s narration by various devices, including having Siobhan read to us from Christopher’s journal, and yet, as well as he’s done it, some of that unique perspective’s magic is lost.
He’s partially substituted playfulness, and Goodwin has assembled a cast that revels in this aspect of the work, as well as giving us most of the heartbreak and most of the warmth. But not quite all.
Daniel R Nixon takes us as deep inside Christopher’s mind as the play allows, and makes us empathise with someone who doesn’t do empathy. It’s a potent performance, especially when he enacts Christopher’s scrupulously logical decision-making process of what course of action to take once he identifies Wellington’s killer.
Brandon McClelland embodies all the inner conflict and frustration of Christopher’s inwardly-turned father, while Matilda Ridgway delivers a live-wire version of his equally conflicted but more extroverted mother. Brigid Zengeni is exceptional as Siobhan: not just a narrator and teacher, but Christopher’s confidant and conscience. Nicholas Brown, Roy Joseph, Tracy Mann and a very amusing Ariadne Sgouros complete the cast, all ably playing multiple roles.
The walls of Zoe Atkinson’s set consist of squares of shades of grey, like the board for a game: for the puzzle that’s the life playing out in Christopher’s head; a head full of wonders. This is theatre as a state of mind, and if it doesn’t shake you up as much as the book, it still brims with humanity.
Until September 24.