The most alarming moment in Mark Haddon’s young adult novel is when Christopher Boone, a 15-year-old on the autism spectrum, flees his Swindon home for London. After a perilous train journey, he arrives at Paddington station and is overwhelmed. The book’s text becomes a barrage of fonts and type sizes to express the information overload: announcements, shop signs and adverts all shouting for his attention.
That sense of cacophony, a sensory assault of products, people and places, characterises Ned Bennett’s ambitious new staging of the Simon Stephens adaptation for Birmingham Rep and Melting Pot. Eleanor Bull’s bare stage, an outsize studio in white, alternates between clean geometric lines, such as the row of pastel-coloured houses that form a picture-book street, and more detailed high-definition projections.
