Spectrum In Order

With proper design, can an environment be hacked to raise the functioning levels of the autistic individual?

- Joie Goh

The stage is set up like a cube, with the top and front panels missing: three perfectly square walls, meeting at right angles, and a perfectly square floor. It isn’t perfectly cubic, however — the floor is tilted slightly higher at the far end, so that the audience seated in the stalls and arena can see that it, like the three walls, is printed with an identitical graph paper pattern and evenly dotted with LED light bulbs all over. To be precise, 892 bulbs.

In the middle of the stage floor, a life-like reproduction of a large Golden Retriever lies on its side, a garden fork speared through its middle. It is as graphic as it is realistic. Blood oozes from where it is impaled; the dog’s mouth is slack, its tongue lolling out.

This is the stark and unapologetic scene that greets the throng of theatre-goers as they fill the seats of the Esplanade Theatre to watch the much-anticipated staging of “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” by London’s National Theatre. No curtains, only the stage and a dead dog.

The requisite announcement that the play would be starting in five minutes comes over the speakers, but other than that, the audience is given no other commentary. Five minutes pass, and the theatre goers begin to grow restless.

Then, without warning, a jarring soundtrack crashes across the auditorium at a volume many decibels above what’s considered tolerably loud. The house lights go off and strobe lights far too bright to be comfortable for the eyes begin flashing on the stage.

I, like many of the audience members, find myself quickly clapping my hands over my ears and averting my gaze from the bright lights, and only finally relaxing into my seat when the volume tapers and the strobe lighting ceases, and the play begins proper.