Form
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time was originally a novel and has been adapted by Simon Stephens into play form. This version of the text is meant to be seen in performance. The staging of the play is original and contributes massively to how the audience perceive the events and characters on stage.
A discussion of how the novel 'The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time' was adapted for the stage.
Woman reads: "My name is Christopher John Francis Boone."
Interview contributor: The story of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time 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.
Christopher: "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."
Mrs Shears: Get away from my dog!
Interview contributor: By following clues and finding things in his house, he goes on a journey to London.
Ticket clerk: Single or return?
Christopher: What does "single or return" mean?
Interview contributor: And discovers his mother, who he thought was dead, is still alive.
Mother: Where's your father, Christopher?
Christopher: I think he's in Swindon.
Interview contributor: His whole family life in his head changes, from what he thought his family life was to the reality of it.
Christopher: Father said you were dead.
Mother: What?
Christopher: He said you went into hospital because you had something wrong with your heart and then you had a heart attack and died.
Mother: Oh, my God.
Interview contributor: 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.
Christopher: I have a rat.
Voice: Rat?!
Christopher: He's called Toby.
Voice: Oh!
Christopher: 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.
Interview contributor: 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.
Interview contributor: My way into interpreting Christopher was being very loyal to Mark Haddon and just really sticking to what he'd written in the novel.
Voice: Maybe I could bring some tea out here! Do you like lemon squash?
Christopher: I only like orange squash.
Voice: Luckily, I have some of that as well.
Oh, and what about Battenberg?
Christopher: I don't know because I don't know what Battenberg is.
Interview contributor: 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.
Voice: Where have you been?
Christopher: I have been out.
Voice: I just had a phone call from Mrs Shears.
What the hell were you doing, poking round her garden?
Christopher: I was doing detective work, trying to figure out who killed Wellington.
Interview contributor: Every time Mark attributes direct speech to a character, it's because they very much want to affect other people they are talking to.
Christopher: I know you told me not to get involved in other people's business, but Mrs Shears is a friend of ours.
Voice: She's not a friend any more.
Interview contributor: 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.
Inspector: Have you got a ticket?
Christopher: No.
Inspector: Well, how, precisely, do you expect to get to London then?!
Interview contributor: 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."
Interview contributor: 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.
Woman reads: "An hour later, Father came home from work."
Father: Christopher, have you seen your mum?
Christopher: Nope.
Woman reads: "He went downstairs and started making some phone calls."
Interview contributor: 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.
Father: I'm afraid you won't be seeing your mother for a while.
Christopher: Why not?
Father: Your mother has had to go into hospital.
Interview contributor: 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.
Woman reads: "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."
Interview contributor: Mark Haddon deliberately didn't explain or describe who Christopher was, but everything is seen through Christopher's eyes in a very gentle way.
Christopher: I think I would make a very good astronaut.
Interview contributor: 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.
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."
Interview contributor: 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.
Siobhan: This is good, Christopher!
It's quite exciting.
Interview contributor: 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.
Siobhan: "There was no-one else near me for thousands and thousands of miles!"
Interview contributor: She's a really invaluable dramatic character.
For me she became the fulcrum of the entire adaptation.
Siobhan: "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
The play fits into three possible A category or type of something, for example 'fiction' and 'non-fiction' are two examples of different genres of books. Fictional books can be divided into many genres - for example mystery, comedy, fantasy or horror. – a family drama, a crime mystery and a coming of age story or A 'coming of age' story, describing a character’s emotional growth as they move from childhood to adulthood..
Family drama
Ed: ‘You have to spend more time with me. And I…I have to show to you that you can trust me.’
The play fits into this genre because it tells the story of Christopher Boone and his family. During the play Christopher discovers that his beliefs about his family are wrong and that his father has been keeping the truth from him.
Crime mystery
Christopher: ‘I was doing detective work trying to figure out who killed Wellington.’
The play is a crime mystery because it follows Christopher's investigation of the death of Mrs Shears' dog, Wellington. Despite his father's warnings, Christopher continues his detective work and discovers the truth about his mother.
Bildungsroman
Christopher: ‘I found my mother. I was brave.’
A bildungsroman is a coming of age story in which we follow the main character as they grow up and learn about themselves and the world. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time fits this genre as Christopher uncovers Wellington's murderer, travels to London, passes his A-level Maths exam at the age of 15 and ultimately learns that he is capable of anything.
In order to analyse form you must:
- consider what aspect of form you are looking at
- think how Stephens has used this for effect
- think how this could impact the audience
Structure
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is presented in a two-part The way the poet has organised the poem on the page eg number of stanzas, lines per stanza, breaks in between lines and stanzas.. The first part details Christopher's investigation into the murder of Wellington, while the second part deals with his journey to London to find his mother. This makes it seem very simple on the surface, but the structure of the play is complex and interesting:
- it is a play within a play
- it has multiple The teller of a story; the voice in a text that describes or narrates the events of the plot. The narrator is often either a character in the story, or an authorial voice who gives a commentary on events but doesn't take part.
- it plays with time and space
Play within a play
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a play within a play because the audience is actually watching the play that Christopher has written to be performed in his school. Towards the end of the play, Christopher is directing the actors in the play.
It was Mother who gave me the milkshake…You need to shout more loudly at him.
This means that the play the audience is watching can be very creative with Narrative is another word for story. voice, use of time and use of space and reality. As this is a play and not “reality”, anything can happen. This gives Stephens and the director of the play lots of creative freedom.
Multiple narrators
Christopher's story is narrated by a number of different voices – his own, Siobhan, who is reading his book and at points, the a cast of actors where each one has a roughly equal amount of time on stage..
This helps to give the audience a sense of how chaotic and detailed the world can seem in Christopher’s mind. One minute the audience can be hearing about an event from Christopher's perspective – then Siobhan can enter the scene to take over narration. When Christopher looks out of the train window, five voices from the Ensemble tell the audience about details he notices. A person without Christopher's mind might only notice one of those things. It helps the audience understand him better.
Time and space
Often in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, the Chronological means following the time order in which events happened. Stories told chronologically start with the earliest event and end with the last. of events is mixed up. The action leaps from the present to the past regularly, and without warning. The same can be said of space or location. Christopher can go from a train, to outside a flat, to outer space, at any point. This makes the events of the play seem fluid and unreal. This again helps the audience get a grasp of what life must be like for Christopher. Interactions with people are confusing to him and when the action jumps around in space and time the audience appreciate this more.
Language and dramatic methods
As The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a play, the language can be split into The words said by a character in a story or play. and stage directions. The dialogue is fast moving and realistic and it can:
- add personality to the characters
- help the audience understand their motivations
- move the action forward (pace)
The stage directions tell the actors what to do on stage or how to say their lines. In The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time the stage directions are simple and focus on actions – where actors should stand and what they should do.
When analysing the language Stephens uses, you could use this structure:
- What are the ideas Stephens is trying to get across?
- How has he chosen particular words to reflect this?
- What effect does this have on the audience?
| Character personality | ||
|---|---|---|
| Idea and words used to reflect it | Why? | Effect |
| Christopher sees the world in a very precise and detailed way: “Then I went up to my bedroom and turned on my bedroom light and played six games of Tetris and got to level 38 which is my fourth best ever score.” | When the characters speak they reveal information about themselves. This helps the audience to understand their personalities. This is particularly important with Christopher who has an unusual personality. | This helps the audience realise that Christopher remembers details that anybody else might ignore. At times this infuriates the other characters that interact with him but as the audience get to know him it becomes endearing. |
| Character motivation | ||
|---|---|---|
| Idea and words used to reflect it | Why? | Effect |
| Ed, Christopher's dad reveals when he is lying through dialogue: “No. It's an ordinary hospital. She has a problem…a problem with her heart.” | It is important that the audience pick up on what the characters are thinking. It helps them to get a better grasp on their motivations. | The pause in this line highlights that his father is lying about the whereabouts of Christopher's mother. At this point the audience can only guess what motivated his father to say this, this engages the audience further. |
| Moving the action forward | ||
|---|---|---|
| Idea and words used to reflect it | Why? | Effect |
| Christopher often states very plainly what he is going to do: “I've decided I’m going to find out who killed Wellington”. | Christopher speaking in such a plain manner is an effective Any use of staging that adds to the drama of a performance.. It helps to move the action forward and keeps the audience informed and engaged. | The audience know exactly what is driving the plot forward at any moment in time, be it looking for Wellington's killer or Christopher's quest to live with his mother. |
In order to analyse language you should:
- Choose a section from the text to analyse and then select a quote from it. Make sure that it is relevant to the question and the point you want to make.
- Consider how the quote reflects character/theme/context. If the quote contains a language device or dramatic method (such as repetition, A metaphor is a word or a phrase used for dramatic effect, to describe something as if it were something else., slang or a note about staging such as lighting) then name the method.
- Explore in detail the impact specific words or phrases have upon the audience.
- Evaluate how effective the author's choice of language is.
Test yourself
Further study
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time: From Page to Stage. collection
Specially shot interviews, combined with clips from the show and exclusive behind-the-scenes rehearsal footage, reveal the thinking and process behind the adaptation.
Artisits at Work. podcast
Mark Haddon discusses his best-selling novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time with Harriett Gilbert.
Open Book. audio
Mariella Frostrup talks to Mark Haddon about his novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.
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