Play Review

On November 23, 2019 I saw a play called The Curious Incident of the Dog in the nighttime In this play there is a young boy named Christopher who has autism and this makes certain things difficult for him. You learn this very early on in the opening scene when there is a dead dog in a garden and a police officer begins to question Christopher. After not getting very far after the questions the police officer gets fed up and tries to touch Christopher to make him get up. However he hates being touched therefore he hit the police officer making matters worse and getting arrested. After all of this blows over Christopher is determined to find out who senselessly killed this dog even after his father told him very clearly not to. Later on this leads to Christopher finding out about his father's affair that he had and also about his mother, long thought to have passed away from a heart attack who is really alive and that his father had been lying to him this entire time. After this Christopher understandably doesn’t trust his dad any longer and goes to live with his mom. However his father does still see him and eventually gives him a puppy of his own and the two make up. In the play The Curious Incident of the Dog in the nighttime I noticed that there were many little things throughout the play that made a large difference that some people might not even notice at all. For example, there were not many props on stage as the play was going on. For the most part the stage was just plain black with some lights here and there but nothing to show the setting really. The character that was highlighted as most important was Christopher. They did this by making him the lead character and by making the audience want Christopher to succeed with what he was doing. No matter if it’s the hunt for who killed the next door neighbors dog or if it’s him taking A level classes. It seemed the audience was always on Christopher’s side. Another thing that the directors did in the play was make some characters completely different from one another one example of when they did this Is Siobhan and Christopher’s father. I felt this way because even though Christopher has a real father and real parents I felt that Siobhan was more of a mentor to Christopher than they really ever were because for a part of his life he thought his mom was dead and he couldn’t put his trust in his father so Siobhan was the only person that he could turn to for help. My favorite actor in this play was the police officer in the beginning scene. This was because the actor that played the officer had the mannerisms of an actual police officer and at the point in the scene when it was time to arrest Christopher the officer had no problem shouting orders at him and bringing him in and acting like an actual police officer. However in the opening scene the actor who played Christopher did a really good job acting out how distressed he was that this entire event was even happening. There were some parts in the play that I didn’t like very much but overall I did enjoy the play. The plot was very interesting and different from pretty much anything I have seen in theater before. Because of this I was very interested early on about what would happen next and this feeling continued throughout the entire play keeping me on the edge of my seat. Some things I learned from this play was to move about the stage freely as if no one is watching because that is way more powerful than just standing on the stage and being shy the entire time. Another surprising thing that I learned from this play was you don’t need to have a bunch of props on stage to be successful. You can have a very plain setup and as long as the acting is good, you will get your point across successfully.