How to adopt a book to a play?

“THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT TIME”, a play adopted by the namesake novel, describes an unusual experience during a detection of Christopher. Suffered from autism, Christopher has a different view of the world from others and a special sentiment towards animals. Realizing that his neighbor’s dog, Wellington, is killed at a midnight, Christopher starts his discovery of the murderer. During his process of investigation, he accidentally finds out many secrets and finally flee to live his mother. All of his experience has been recorded in his own book, which is the primary content of both novel and play. Nevertheless, despite the similarity in the main plot, the play version of the story has differed from the novel in some details, which are confusing for audience or hard to perform.

To start with, the play version has reduced many actions of the characters and cut some long parts into small pieces of scenes. The novels contains abundant movements and emotional changes of characters while a play mostly needs dialogues to present everything happens. The play writer Stephens Simon sets Christopher’s book as the base of the plot and smartly let Siobhan to read the book out when Christopher shares it with her. In this way, there is no need of another person to read out and explain the plots any more. 

Furthermore, some parts which are difficult for audiences to follow are deleted or lessened. For instance, Christopher is described as counting prime number every time when he feels uncomfortable. The novel actually listed dozens of prime number when he is counting. Nevertheless, hearing numbers on the stage would be annoying for many audience like me who are not good at math at all; prime numbers would absolutely confuse me. May base on this reason, the play has only few parts mentioning actual prime numbers.

Last but not least, the play writer omits the parts which are unable to perform. Some parts might be too time consuming and others might need to take too much efforts. In the novel, Christopher vomits after knowing that his father has murdered Wellington and lied to him about his mother. It would be a harsh task for an actor to perform this scene on a stage and actually turn he or herself into a mess. Thus, the play emphasize on how Christopher curls himself like a ball to show his sadness and madness. 

In conclusion, the play writer has changed the script a lot from the original novel to control the time and present the best show for audiences. For my own, the play is a lot easier to read since there are fewer words which could already present most of the plot in the novel. Nevertheless, the novel has a high literature value. Details in the novel can help readers understand the story better. Furthermore, the story of Christopher triggers my attention to autism, and people who are in the same situation as Christopher. Both version have well presented the aberrations and difficulties of Christopher and appeal the society to care more about this certain kind of people who are different from us.