play review

Play review of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time

The play is called “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time” and happened in the black box theater in Cheshire Academy in November 15, 2019. The student director is Olivia Williamson and the major actors are Amelia Williams, Olivia Williamson and William Lempling. 

This play is about an autism kid called Christopher who find his father Ed kills the dog and lie to him. Christopher wants to live with his mom Judy in London. Then his mom takes him back to take A level test and get a good grade. Finally his father apologize to him and give him a dog as a gift. The major theme of this play is about the relationship in an autism kid family. There are tons of scene about the discuss between Christopher and Ed or with Judy. Also the way of parenting Christopher changes. His father Ed always gets angry with Christopher because they have no way to have good discussion between them. Then the scene between Christopher and Judy shows that even Judy loves him so much, it’s still very hard to parent him because for other people like Roger feels Christopher is really annoying. Overall, the whole theme of the play is to let people understand how hardness taking care of an autism kid as family.

The staging is really successful in this play. Because lots of stage highlight the characters characteristics. For example, the scene that Christopher readers the letter from his mom, The stage only have the box and toy bricks. When Christopher mentally collapse, he throw all the letters all around. This staging really effectively shows Christopher wants to see his mom and feel extremely disappointed if the letter is really comes from his mom. The purpose that the director do this is because when audience sees a person who throw all the letters all around the ground with sadly crying. It makes people a sense of sympathy to the character. While also tells audiences autism kid need someone really to take care of him and really needs others sympathy. Also the costume of Christopher is very suitable for his characters. He wears red loose belt jacket. When a autism kid feels not one is around him so he play with his posse belt. The purpose that director do this is because this can help audience understand if no one take cares of an autism kid, how boring his life is.

There is one moment that very interested me. There is a scene that Christopher talks to himself while his teacher taunt about him make me really memorable. The reason that this moment makes me memorable is because almost all of us have same experience with Christopher. For the time I image to do something that almost impossible to come true. There are always a voice some voice that taunt me about it. For example, if I am now think about getting an A on this review, my teacher may says “OK”. By creating this moment, it helps audience getting into that condition and know what’s the feeling of an autism kid. As an audience I would say it’s very effective because almost each audience gets what the audience trying to tell us.

Ed is my favorite actor because he really express Ed’s emotion at every single scene. He is really natural and emotional. For example, when he tells Christopher don’t find who kill the dog,  after several time his patient is getting less which really shows when his acting, his voice getting louder and louder. While doing the fight scene, he performs very well  because I know fighting scene is really hard to do.

Overall I like this play because every actor performs very emotional and shows their own character. The rest audience seems very enjoy it because they laugh during some scenes. I learn when performance, everyone have to put their effort in this and also the whole play needs to cooperate with each other, including the sounds, light and other actors.