This ‘curious’ role

The hottest young male lead part of the moment for amateur actors!

For male actors, the dream dramatic role is often Hamlet, the brutal Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire or perhaps the manipulative salesman Ricky Roma in David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross.

But a multi-faceted challenge for a young male actor has emerged recently in the form of troubled teenager Christopher Boone in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a play first performed on the professional stage in 2012. Adapted by Simon Stephens from Mark Haddon’s popular and much lauded book, the drama was released for amateur performance in 2023. Since then, community groups throughout the UK have eagerly jumped on the opportunity to stage it with a number of productions having been staged in NODA East region and beyond over the last year.

The role of 15-year-old Christopher is complex. He is a maths genius and is highly intelligent. His family is broken. He may or may not be neurodivergent – neither the book nor the play puts a specific identity to his condition, but he shares characteristics such as not being able to connect with people through direct eye contact, difficulty with social interactions, sensory sensitivity, rigidity and resistance to change that are often associated with autism. And he has set himself the task of finding out who murdered his neighbour’s poodle with a garden fork and why the dog was killed. The play’s action follows Christopher through growth and development as he gets to grips with his family situation, travels by himself from his home in Swindon to London and experiences more of life than he might have otherwise.

The actors who are lucky enough to win this role, in their community productions, say they go on significant life journeys of their own. Phil Chapman played Christopher in Haslingfield (Cambridgeshire) Little Theatre’s staging in March this year, and he said that he gained “more understanding of myself” as a result. “I have OCD [obsessive-compulsive disorder, a mental health condition characterised by obsessions and compulsions that can be time consuming and cause distress or interfere with daily life], a generalised anxiety disorder, and I’ve always considered it a problem, something that was really wrong. But when I sort of thought about it, it is just the way I am and actually, I live my life as me rather than seeing it as something else.

What I took away from it was being able to conceive people as they are, rather than as people with a condition or disability,” he said. “I like to think that when people watch the play, at the beginning, they see Christopher as having some sort of neurodevelopmental condition, and by the end, they see him as a person who can do things. This is their character, this is who they are. It’s not some kind of weird force making people do the things they do.”

Chapman is an outlier when it came to playing this particular role; the University of Cambridge fundraiser is actually 30, in contrast to Christopher’s 15. However, he said he “absolutely could not” have successfully played the part at the younger age. He laughed, saying, “When I was 15, I didn’t have OCD; it’s something I developed later in life. I was very overconfident and quite cocky, and I think I probably would have approached it in a less mindful way!”

Haslingfield’s audiences responded warmly to the production. Chapman said two reactions touched him most: one woman approached him, took his face in her hands and then gave him a hug, “which was really nice,” he said. Another woman had been affected so emotionally that she could not speak when she first encountered Chapman and “just stood there for a long time; she couldn’t get her words out. Then she just said so quietly, ‘Thank you’.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The King’s Lynn Players in Norfolk faced a major upset early on in their production when the director who had been entrusted with bringing the play to the stage fell ill. To the rescue came Sarah Krill, who had been cast in the show originally but then took on the directorship. Krill and KLPs’ Christopher, Logan Petterson-Cooper, had the “sort of ‘autistic discussion’,” she said, “and I did think about getting somebody in to talk about it, and then I thought, no, that was not what this play was about. I think it should be about how Christopher, as a teenager, deals with things that everyday teenagers deal with. We didn’t dwell on it (the question of whether Christopher was autistic). We were aware it was there, but we didn’t make it foremost in our thoughts.”

One of the thorniest parts of the script is at the very end, when Christopher takes the audience through his “favourite equation”, an algebraic computation that in the context of the play has helped him achieve a top score in his A level exam. Petterson-Cooper, who’s 17, was able to master behavioural aspects of his character more easily than embedding the maths knowledge in his memory, he said. “It’s funny; I’ve never been the greatest at maths. But it was just being consistent. Like I would just be random places, like on the tube, just reciting maths. People probably thought I was a bit weird. Honestly, it was just repeat, repeat, repeat.

If you don’t put in the work,” he continued, “you won’t get it, but I just every day was constantly look at that script. It became a part of my day-to-day life.”

Christopher’s math prowess, he acknowledged, was less relatable to him than other aspects of the character. But Christopher’s triumph of ultimate achievement when he earns a top maths score was highly relatable, Petterson-Cooper said. “It’s that time for Christopher, where he’s finally seeing his triumph. He’s getting this realisation that if he can do this, he can do that, and he can live that life he wants - a very good life.” And in performance, Petterson-Cooper said, “I think the audience felt that as well. You get that feeling, I definitely think, the audience felt that power.”

Once the show was over, Petterson-Cooper said, he had to “rebuild” some of his own personal traits after working hard to take on some of Christopher’s, such as “to not look at people in the eye, to keep my head a certain way, to show my hands in a certain way”. At the same time, in some scenes, he found he was able to drift from the conversation around him because “he’s so happy in his own mind, thinking about space and his pet rat and math, and he’s so comfortable in himself, in his head, that he can stay there no matter where he is. That’s his escape mechanism when he’s struggling.”

But as deeply immersive as the role of Christopher is, both Chapman and Petterson-Cooper – as their counterparts across the UK will likely have done - have put the troubled hero back in his box for now and gone on to their next projects. For Chapman, it’s a directing project at Haslingfield. For Petterson-Cooper, it’s a role in KLPs’ upcoming production of Titanic.

DeeDee Doke

NODA East Regional Editor