AN EXTRAORDINARY TALE

Diving into director Atul Kumar's new play The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

- Alpana Chowdhury

The pun on the back of Christopher D'Souza's red T-shirt sums up his temperament perfectly. The front says NASA. The back says 'I like my space'. While he jealously guards his personal space, Christopher is also fascinated with celestial space. One of his favourite books, gifted to him by his favourite teacher, Fatima Miss, has a chapter on black holes which makes a lot of sense to him, even helping him to understand death.

This is quite unusual for a 15-year-old.

But Christopher is no ordinary teenager. Even his dreams are very different from those of 'normal' youngsters. "While I was reading the book, I thought that if I were an astronaut, I could go far away, maybe even live alone in space. It would be quiet, with just my maths book and maybe a telescope," he muses as he turns the pages. Astronomy, Maths, solitude are precious to him. "I don't really fit in with other people. That makes other people more uncomfortable than it makes me," he notes in his diary, quite happy in his own space.

This extraordinary teenager, marvellously portrayed by actor Dheer Hira, was the lead character of a riveting play, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which was the opening show of the seventh season of Aadyam Theatre, an Aditya Birla Group initiative. Based on Mark Haddon's novel by the same name, and adapted for the stage by Simon Stephens, the play was further tweaked by director Atul Kumar for an Indian audience.