Boy Wonder:
When Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, came out in 2003, there was still a lot of ignorance about mental illness, and it was not spoken about openly, like it is now. The protagonist of the book is a 15-year-old maths wiz, who is on the autism spectrum. He has, “behaviourial difficulties” – he does not like to be touched, for instance; even though the blurb of the book labelled it Asperger’s Syndrome, the author denied it, after some controversy. He is quoted as having said, “it’s a novel about difference, about being an outsider, about seeing the world in a surprising and revealing way. The book is not specifically about any specific disorder.”
Tough to adapt for the stage in any case, but Simon Stephens pulled it off, and then the National Theatre came up with a tech-heavy production with projection, and stylized lighting to achieve a kind of hallucinatory effect that would reflect the bewildered mind of a teen, facing unfamiliar experiences. Atul Kumar’s Indian production uses this form, and places the story in Mumbai, changing the visuals of, say, the London underground to the Mumbai local train. The crowds here would be even more disorienting to a young boy, whose interaction with strangers has been kept to a minimum. This production, the first of the five plays in the seventh edition of Aditya Birla Group’s theatre initiative, Aadyam, starts the new season on a high note.
Christopher (Dheer Hira) lives with his father Peter (Jaimini Pathak) in Bandra, and has been told that his mother Judy (Shivani Tanksale) had died of a heart attack. Peter does his best to look after Chistopher with patience and understanding, but his condition makes it difficult. The only friend he seems to have is his pet rat, Toby, and the only teacher in school he confides in is the compassionate Fatima (Dilnaz Irani), who also reads out the story from Christopher’s diary, so that words from the pages of the novel are incorporated into the play.
When The Curious Incident…opens, Oscar, the neighbour’s dog, has been found dead by Christopher, stabbed with a garden fork. The cops are summoned, and when the policeman grabs Chistopher’s hand, the boy bites him. He is taken to the police station, where his questioning by the cop (Abhay Kaul) is played out for its humour, though for a frightened boy the strangeness is overwhelming.
In spite of being warned against it by his father, Christopher sets out to investigate who killed Oscar, which takes him out of his shell, and onto an unexpected adventure involving a terrifying local train journey.
Dheer Hira, in a brilliant performance as Christopher, takes care to calibrate his performance in a way that he never overplays either the oddity of the character’s behaviour, nor overdoes the trauma. The audience is made to sympathise not just with Christopher, but with the parents who have to cope with a neurodiverse child, who is unsettled with the slightest detour from his set boundaries.(As he says “Normal is what people expect me to be, but no one seems to know exactly what it means.”)
The other actors come together in a cohesive ensemble, playing multiple roles, but also in crowd scenes, or as parts of Christopher’s imagination. The actors’ movements (choreographer Aseng Borang), lights (Sarthak Narula), music (Bhaskar Rao), trance-like soundscape (Mantra Mugdha), are in perfect sync with the impressive video and art projections (Gaurav Singh Nijjar). The visuals work towards portraying what is going on in Cristopher’s mind, and also create backdrops for the locations where the scenes take place. All of this creates a sensory experience that enhances the story, but does not drown out the nuances.
Atul Kumar may have been inspired by the successful and award-winning National Theatre production, but his version gives audiences a work of imaginative stagecraft and a coordination between the ensemble and the design that brings Christopher’s story alive on stage. The play, like him, is funny, sad and hopeful.
(This piece first appeared in mumbaitheatreguide.com)