The Dramatic Adaptation of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Abstract

Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a first-person metafictional novel that the British-Irish playwright Simon Stephens has adapted into a play of the same title. The adaptation remains grounded in its source text while generating new meanings through a change of genre. Attentive to the narrative possibilities of dramatic writing, Stephens reworks both the novel’s narrative mechanisms and its characterization. By making Christopher’s inner experience perceptible through action and dialogue, the adaptation enables readers or spectators to apprehend his distinctive mode of cognition and the complexity of his family relationships. It also extends the work’s exploration of difference and understanding. Source novel and adaptation thus sustain an intertextual dialogue marked by both continuity and transformation.