As the title of the play The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time suggests, there is a palpable sense of something sinister going to unfold on stage. And it does, right at the onset. The curtain rises on a dead dog named Oscar with a garden fork sticking out of his body.
The case of the expired mutt sets things in motion for Christopher D’Souza (Dheer Hira), ‘the 15 years, two months and two days’ old teenager who stays in Bandra, Mumbai, with his father Peter (Jaimini Pathak).
Christopher, who is neurodivergent and on the autism spectrum, takes it on himself to find out who the dog-killer is, even as he studies for his Math exams. As he digs deeper and finally solves the mystery, many other skeletons come tumbling out of his family’s closet.
First performed in Mumbai as part of Aadyam Theatre’s seventh season, Atul Kumar’s reimagining of Mark Haddon’s acclaimed work of the same name was staged at the Kamani Auditorium in Delhi recently. Kumar refuses to term it as an ‘adaptation’ because the play—originally adapted for the stage by Simon Stephens—retains all its lines, with just a tweak here and there to fit the script into an Indian setting.
For Kumar, it was the “onion-like quality” of the story where layers are peeled off to expose what’s lying within, that appealed to the director in him. “On the face of it, it is a story of a boy who has Aspergers, but the story is not just about how he manages to deal with his surroundings and people, and overcomes so-called shortcomings. But it’s a story about us recognising that all of us are different from each other, and we should be tolerant, accommodating and accepting of these differences,” he says.
Each time Christopher’s heartbeat rises or he flinches on being touched, the audio and visual projections support the same, either with the sound of loud heartbeats or glitches on the screen. At other times, the visuals change to show the bylanes of Bandra or the train station where Christopher goes to board the local train in order to look for his mother and the audio turns to the things he is hearing—the sound of a child crying or cricket commentary on someone’s television.
“We wanted to create what is happening in Christopher’s mind, what he is feeling, his rhythms and how he sees the things that he sees. As the play progresses, those things get more and more troubled and the reality in front of him takes another form,” shares the director.
With eight actors on stage playing multiple characters, there is a feeling of constant motion and at times, of utmost stillness as Christopher reacts to the happenings around him. And when the mystery is resolved, Christopher clears his A-levels in Math and finds some sort of a rhythm with his parents, what’s to become of him?
“All these beautiful things that human beings achieve against all odds get normalised and become a part of our life and that is something I feel happens at the end for him, and for everybody who is trying to make this world a beautiful place,” he says. Amen to that.