The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time

Theatre Royal, Bath

Until Saturday, March 25

SOMETIMES you see a review where a film is mildly panned as being ’stagey’. This is a handy code which basically means that the things film can alone do (editing, point of view etc) have been sidelined in favour of what mostly happens in plays (actors saying words).

This tired trope is turned on its head in this production, which, while being as filmic as it gets, also shows us what theatre alone is capable of communicating, and what state-of-the-art theatre can be.

In this production, there is whole arsenal of techniques and technologies focused with immense skill and organisation on telling a very human story.

Video, lighting, sound design and a fluid and energetic cast all combine to articulate the drama of 15-year-old autistic Christopher’s interior life.

Having long ago read the best-selling book and heard that it had been dramatised I wondered exactly how the intensely subjective experience of (as one of the show’s ‘Autism Consultants’ puts it) ‘impaired empathising alongside superior systematizing’ could possibly be translated to the stage.

How do you stage what’s inside the Rainman’s head?

Astonishingly, the most exhilarating part of the show was just this process. For example, during Christophers Odyssean journey from Swindon to Willesden we get to compare a regular person’s thought processes, while looking out of a train window, with his. Our banal stream of consciousness ambles along noticing this and that, going off-piste to think how nice a bag of Quavers might be. Christopher’s brain, meanwhile, is compulsively annotating cows, houses, trees, in exact and impossible detail. Adrian Sutton’s music (a perfectly appropriate blend of electronica, dubstep and 8-bit video game jingles) accelerates with the rhythm of the train; the projected images multiply dizzyingly until there’s a strobed, deafening catastrophe as Christopher’s overloaded fusebox blows.

That there are many such moments in this production is astounding.

Masterpiece is not too strong a word.

- BARRY ANDREWS