A scene from This Is Our Youth. via
Simon Stephens’s adaptation of Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, directed by Marianne Elliott (War Horse) for the National Theater at the Barrymore, is one of the more visually striking productions in recent memory. It calls to mind no other play but does resemble in a more than superficial way the recent staging of Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and in Berkeley (where I saw it). Its geometrically delineated stage and cold LED lighting suggest a sort of analytical neural atlas upon whose pages unfolds the story of Christopher Boone (Alex Sharp), the presumably autistic young mathematical savant who must venture out from the orderly world he has constructed for himself in order to solve the titular mystery involving a household pet—he insists on describing the crime as a “murder”—which turns out to be a smaller, nearly insignificant part of a much larger and much more personal mystery.
Mr. Sharp is not exactly a veteran of the stage. In fact, he graduated from the Juilliard School only this May and was cast in the lead even before then. Even so, it takes a little generosity of the imagination to accept the twenty-five-year-old Mr. Sharp as the fifteen-year-old Christopher, especially during the scenes in which he goes shirtless and reveals himself as a fully developed man. But his
