Playhouse, Arts Centre Melbourne
January 13, 2018

Adapted from Mark Haddon’s celebrated novel of the same name, National Theatre’s production of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time comes to Melbourne via West End and Broadway success. That loaded the Australian premiere with a heavy weight of expectation, but it’s theatre of such insight and ingenuity that those expectations have been easily exceeded.

Presented by the Melbourne Theatre Company with a UK cast, the play surprised even before it began, as a realistic prop dog lay at the centre of the stage, skewered with a large garden fork. Its death prompts chief protagonist, 15-year-old Christopher, to play at being detective. For this autistic boy with a fiercely logical mind, finding out who killed the dog is not child’s play, however. It’s a serious puzzle to be solved and, as it turns out, the catalyst for two unexpected journeys he’s ill-equipped to take: one of emotional discovery about his parents’ relationship with him and with each other, and a physical journey to London in search of his mother.

Joshua Jenkins as Christopher Boone in The Curious Incident of the Dog in...