At a Right Angle: What Curious Incident Teaches Us About “Performing” Autism

There’s a moment near the end of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time—the stage adaptation—that still sits in my body years after I first saw it.

Christopher, a 15-year-old boy coded as autistic, has done something monumental: he traveled to London on his own, solved the mystery of who killed Wellington (the dog), found his mother, survived a sensory and emotional gauntlet, and wrote a book about it. And then he asks the question that lands like a dare:

“Does that mean I can do anything?”

In the production I saw, his teacher Siobhan didn’t answer right away. The script says: “The two look at each other for a while.” In that pause, the actor playing Siobhan filled the silence with conflict—wanting to say yes, but hesitating, as if afraid that “yes” would be a lie.

The second time I saw the play, something happened that only live theatre can deliver: during that silence, someone in the audience shouted out:

“Yeah!”

A spontaneous benediction. A vote of confidence. A person moved enough to interrupt Broadway etiquette and insist on hope.

And that’s exactly why this play matters.

Because that “Yeah!”—generous, heartfelt, and deeply human—also reveals the cultural story we’ve been trained to want.

The story we’re hungry for: transcendence

Curious Incident invites us to read Christopher’s journey as a triumph: if he can do this, then he can do anything. It’s a familiar American narrative, especially around disability—the “overcoming” story. The disabled person achieves something that proves disability can be transcended, outworked, or left behind.

The audience member who yelled “Yeah!” wasn’t trying to do harm. He was doing what the play taught him to do: identify with Christopher, root for him, crave resolution, and want the ending to mean limitlessness.

But that’s where the political problem begins.

Because the play doesn’t just portray an autistic character. It performs autism—creating a specific, culturally palatable “version” of autism, then selling that version back to a largely neurotypical audience as insight.

Autism as character… and autism as spectacle

On the surface, the plot is straightforward: Christopher finds a dog murdered with a garden fork, investigates, discovers family secrets, runs away, finds his mother, returns home, takes his A-levels, and ends on a hopeful note.

Underneath, Curious is doing something more ambitious: it tries to let the audience experience Christopher’s interior world. Lights, sound, projection, choreography—all designed to simulate sensory overload, pattern-thinking, and the feeling of being out of sync with the social world.

And that’s the complication:

• The novel’s author, Mark Haddon, is not autistic.

• The playwright, Simon Stephens, is not autistic.

• The Broadway/West End creative teams and the actors (in the major productions) were not autistic.

  
  

Since the original Broadway/West End productions, some shows have featured actors with autism. Productions have also utilized "autism consultants." Overwhelmingly, though, what we’re watching is a neurotypical production of what neurotypical artists imagine autism feels like—delivered with spectacular theatrical tools.

That spectacle can be moving. It can be beautiful. It can also be a form of commodification: disability as an experience you can “visit” for the price of a ticket.

The looping effect: how stereotypes get made (and remade)

Here’s the dynamic that often happens with disability representation:

1. Culture has a vague, stereotyped sense of what autism “is.”

2. Artists draw from that cultural sense to create an autistic character.

3. The character becomes widely influential.

4. The public then uses that character as a reference point for real autistic people.

That loop reshapes the category itself.

You see this when autistic people say some version of: “When I tell people I’m autistic, they immediately ask if I’m like Rain Man or Curious Incident.”

A fiction becomes the public’s “template,” and real people get compared against it.

Even when writers insist they’re avoiding stereotypes, if they rely on the traits the general public already recognizes as “autism,” they may end up reinforcing the same narrow image—just with more polish.

The autistic detective: a long tradition with real consequences

In Curious Incident, Christopher explicitly admires Sherlock Holmes. That’s not an incidental choice—it situates Christopher inside a recognizable literary lineage: the “autistic detective.”

Think of the detective archetype we see again and again:

• emotionally flat (or perceived that way)

• socially confusing

• intensely logical

• hyper-observant

• solitary

• “machine-like”

• brilliant to the point of savantism

Sherlock Holmes is often described as automaton-like. Many contemporary detective figures carry similar coding. The archetype becomes shorthand: this person is different, therefore special, therefore not quite like us.

When Christopher is framed through that lineage, the play isn’t just telling a story—it’s tapping into a pre-existing cultural script about autism.

Trait as punchline: “Aren’t you happy?”

One of the play’s recurring comic effects is Christopher’s lack of conventional emotional display.

When Christopher gets the best possible exam result, Siobhan asks, “Aren’t you happy?” and Christopher answers, essentially: yes, objectively, this is the best result.

In performance, the line often gets a laugh—not because the audience hates Christopher, but because the play trains us to treat his difference as both charming and funny.

The risk is that “difference-as-comedy” slides easily into “difference-as-inhuman.”

The interpreter: why the neurotypical guide matters

Christopher’s story reaches us through Siobhan: teacher, narrator, translator. Like Watson to Holmes, Siobhan contextualizes Christopher for the audience.

That structure matters because it quietly suggests:

• Christopher needs interpretation to be legible.

• The audience will be closer to Siobhan’s “normal” than to Christopher’s “right angle.”

• Christopher’s interior life is accessed through a neurotypical mediator.

It’s not that interpretive relationships are inherently wrong. It’s that, culturally, this pattern encourages a familiar positioning: autistic people as objects to be explained, and neurotypical people as the ones authorized to explain them.

The right angle: a metaphor that does real work

The production’s central metaphor is striking: at times, other characters physically tilt, creating the impression that Christopher is oriented differently in the same space—at a right angle to everyone else.

It’s brilliant theatre.

It’s also a metaphor that risks turning autism into permanent otherness: same world, but rotated 90 degrees away from “human normal.”

When the sound design leans metallic and electronic; when the set becomes a glowing grid; when machines and outer space become Christopher’s preferred companions—the play reinforces a familiar trope:

autistic = robot/alien/machine

That trope is seductive because it’s visually legible. It is also dehumanizing, because it reduces a complex social identity to an aesthetic of coldness and circuitry.

Savantism as acceptability (and its shadow)

Christopher’s math talent makes him “acceptable” in a way disability narratives often require. High achievement functions like a cultural permission slip: see, he’s not just disabled—he’s exceptional.

But savantism also fuels fascination. Christopher becomes not just a person but an object of wonder: part fragile child, part superhuman mind.

That tension—less-than-human + more-than-human—is one reason autism is so fetishized in popular culture. It’s also why so many autistic people feel erased: most real lives aren’t built to be inspiring or astonishing on demand.

The family story underneath the story

Even as the play centers Christopher, it also advances another familiar narrative: disability as a threat to family stability.

• Christopher’s mother leaves, explicitly linking her departure to her inability to cope.

• His father’s life collapses into rage and loneliness.

• A romantic partner becomes hostile, nearly violent.

• Caring for Christopher is framed as exhausting, marriage-breaking, life-defining.

The play doesn’t show Christopher being harmed. But it repeatedly stages the idea that autism provokes or invites harm—through other people’s frustration, volatility, and resentment.

The danger here isn’t that it’s “unrealistic” (many families do struggle). The danger is the cultural takeaway: disability as a burden that breaks “normal” life, rather than a social identity shaped by (and often made harder by) environments, systems, and lack of support.

So what do we do with a play that moves us—and misses us?

I’m not arguing that Curious Incident has no artistic value. It’s inventive. It’s emotionally effective. It’s smart theatre.

I’m arguing that it’s also an example of how disability can be:

• constructed through stereotype

• performed for a non-disabled audience

• marketed as authentic insight

• rewarded for its spectacle

• and consumed with very little accountability to the people it depicts

When a production claims to show the audience “what it’s like to be in Christopher’s head,” but does not meaningfully collaborate with autistic artists, it risks turning autism into a theme park: immersive, intense, and escapable.

You leave the theatre. Autism stays behind—attached to real people who then have to navigate the stereotypes the art helped strengthen.

A better question than “Can he do anything?”

Maybe the most important moment in the play isn’t Christopher’s question.

It’s Siobhan’s pause.

Because that pause holds the tension we should sit with—not the desire for transcendence, but the reality of limits, supports, environments, and dignity.

A more useful set of questions might be:

• What does Christopher need to thrive—and who is responsible for providing it?

• What do we gain when autistic people are centered as creators, not just subjects?

• What would change if we stopped demanding “inspiration” and started demanding access?

• When we applaud a disability story, who benefits—and who pays for the stereotypes it reinforces?

If we want disability art that is genuinely liberatory, we need more than representation. We need inclusion in authorship, direction, design, casting, and critique.

Not just stories about autistic people—but stories shaped with autistic people.