Simon Stephens’ adaptation of The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time has picked up the award for MasterCard Best New Play at this year’s Olivier Awards with MasterCard.
One of the most hotly anticipated accolades to be handed out at the annual ceremony, the win marks the second Olivier Award for acclaimed playwright Stephens, whose Stockport-set play On The Shore Of The Wide World won seven years ago following an acclaimed run at the National’s Cottesloe theatre.
The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time, which follows in the footsteps of Stephens’ previous success having also opened at the National Theatre’s smallest auditorium, transferred to the Apollo theatre earlier this year where it currently continues to wow audiences with its tale about a 15-year-old boy who embarks on a mission to discover who murdered his neighbour’s dog.
After coming off the stage following the presentation of his award, Stephens said: “It feels slightly overwhelming, I have to say. Tremendously overwhelming, but tremendously, tremendously exciting and immensely flattering.”
When asked whether he had the show’s innovative design in mind when writing the script, Stephens commented: “Elements of it were, but I never really came close to the imagination of Bunny Christie and Marianne Elliot to bring that together, or any of those people. Scott Graham and Stephen Hoggett from Frantic Assembly, Finn Ross the video designer, Paule Constable the lighting designer, Adrian Sutton the composer, Ian Dickinson the sound designer; it was all a complete collaboration.”
Nominated for a staggering eight awards at this year’s ceremony, the production, which was adapted from Mark Haddon’s best-selling novel, is directed by Marianne Elliott and features what The Guardian’s Michael Billington described as “a remarkable performance from Luke Treadaway.”
The author was at the ceremony to collect the award alongside Stephens. Speaking backstage Haddon said the win was “profoundly wonderful,” explaining: “When I first wrote it I thought it would be really nice if I got a few thousand people to read it and now I feel like I’ve entered this parallel universe. I sat there on the first night and I thought ‘This is just the most wonderful piece of theatre’. I forgot it had anything to do with me, then I remembered it had something to do with me. It was one strange whirligig. It’s been amazing, absolutely amazing.”
