Sarah

I was observing a discussion yesterday on Twitter between Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and Dean Betz, the executive producer of MSN News. From what I could surmise, Betz had seen our elder sibling show in the USA and taken issue with it: namely that it misrepresented autism by associating it with violence, divorce and inappropriate humour. Haddon's response was that Curious is a piece of fiction - and, in the hands of Simon Stephens, drama - and cannot possibly represent everyone; nor is it meant to.

This interested me, not only because it's an ongoing argument (which seems to be particularly current on the other side of the Atlantic); but because it's something that was on my mind anyway, and something that I touched on in this blog earlier this week. As I said then, nobody is claiming that this play has the same effect on everyone; but, speaking as someone who is in the fortunate position to hear thousands of people react to this story every week, I feel that I should redress the balance of this discussion for anyone who feels that the depiction of autism in this play is, in Betz's words, "just plain wrong".

I mentioned previously that we (specifically, our lead actor Joshua Jenkins) had received a letter from a young lady expressing how much she identified with Christopher's story. This is what she said (click on photo to enlarge):

This is of course just one point of view. But it's a useful reminder for me of why we do this play. I daresay some actors, writers and directors feel that theatre belongs to them. I don't think it does. I think it belongs to people like Sarah.