Rendering 5 (Theatre)

The article published on the website BBC News on August 6, 2012, is headlined “National Theatre adapts Mark Haddon's Curious Incident”. The article is written by a BBC journalist Kev Geoghegan and reports us about the fact that The National Theatre has produced the first stage adaptation of Mark Haddon's best-selling novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

It’s an open secret that A mysterious tale of a murdered dog, narrated by an introspective 15-year-old maths genius with a form of autism, the 2003 book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is not exactly an easy sell to theatre audiences. The author quotes the words of book's author Mark Haddon. "About two and a half years ago, we realised that we were getting a lot of requests for stage adaptations including, bizarrely, musical adaptations of the book."Some seemed to work, some were obviously rubbish and some were just fishing. We realised we were in a position to sit down and see who would we like to do it."

The author also makes special emphasize on the actors of the play. Stephens brought on board Marianne Elliott, director of the National's multi-award winning adaptation of War Horse.Luke Treadaway, who - alongside twin brother Harry is one of the UK's most exciting young actors - takes on the central role of Christopher Boone with Spooks actress Nicola Walker as mum Judy and Paul Ritter as his father Ed.The cast also includes veteran actress Una Stubbs as Christopher's elderly neighbour Mrs Alexander and Niamh Cusack as his teacher.

The sparse set, by renowned designer Bunny Christie, takes on its own character in the play. Seemingly a series of simple geometric squares, it pulses with energy, boosted by lighting and projections of numbers and stars, reflecting Christopher's fascination with mathematics and order.Unfortunately, the author of the article doesn’t express his own opinion about this play. To my mind it is a very unusual play mainly because it is rather difficult to show.