Drama Theatre Skopje

The play "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time" by Simon Stevens is actually an adaptation of the popular 2003 novel of the same name by Mark Haddon. This novel has won 17 prestigious awards, including the Whitebread Award. The adaptation was written in 2012 and was successfully performed first at the National Theatre in London. Set in Swindon and London, the story concerns 15-year-old Christopher John Francis Boone, a mathematical genius who has an unspecified autism spectrum disorder. Christopher has to solve a mystery. Someone killed the neighbor's dog with a pitchfork and Christopher is a suspect, then released on parole. Wanting to find out who killed Wellington and going against his father's wishes and orders, Christopher begins an investigation into the dog's murder, asking him questions and writing down his actions and findings in a book. Christopher has Asperger's syndrome (which belongs to the family of autistic disorders) and has never gone further than the end of the street himself before, but the detective work takes him on a dangerous journey that shatters his entire previously known world. The cosmos of the one who "cannot lie" (which is in the definition of his condition) is tectonically displaced by the realization that he is a victim of the lies of his parent, his closest ones, his only true support, the source of trust and security. The play thoroughly reworks the source material. Instead of the first-person narration as in the novel, the dramatic text presents a combination of relationships and angles, from the point of view of Christopher Boone himself, but also of all those who come into contact with his book or are part of it - his teacher, his father, his mother... The result is a drama - within - a drama. What makes "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time" an exciting material to work with is the theme that this text opens up. This is Christopher's world, the world of the "special", "different", "rejected", "ridiculed", "undervalued". At a time when many societies, including ours, are struggling for the inclusion of people with special needs, working on such a current material seems extremely important. In that sense, the play will also have an educational - educational function and will be able to determine it for one of its target groups and the young teenage audience. On the other hand, the genre of black comedy and the sometimes cruelly sharp, although infinitely witty, language, bring it primarily to the evening terms and complicate its role.