Simon Stephens, the playwright of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, writes here about how he strives to create empathetic characters in his plays: people who we can recognize and relate to and who move us with their choices in the face of diversity.
Christopher has Asperger’s syndrome. At the beginning of his story, he discovers that his neighbor’s dog has been killed. This curious incident shakes him up. Christopher is exactingly literal in how he deals with things. He does not tell lies, as he tells us. This is not because “I am a good person” but because he simply cannot tell lies—the concept is alien to him. He is mystified by the idea of metaphors, because, as he says,
I think it should be called a lie because a pig is not like a day and people do not have skeletons in their cupboards. And when I try to make a picture of the thing in my head it just confuses me because imagining an apple in someone’s eye doesn’t have anything to do with liking someone a lot and it makes you forget what the person was talking about.
As Christopher investigates the death of his neighbor’s dog, he inadvertently stumbles into a web of secrets being kept by his parents, Ed and Judy, that ironically and inexorably lead to his discovery of who killed the neighbor dog, Wellington.
The dark family secret is that Judy left the family—and Christopher—a few years before because her marriage to Ed was disintegrating and because she was not able cope with Christopher’s autism effectively. To make matters worse, Ed has lied to Christopher and told him that his mother is dead. And to make things even worse, it was Ed himself who got out-of-control angry one night and killed the neighbor's dog. When Christopher finds out the truth about all of this, he short-circuits and decides to leave his father and go to see his mother in London.
Now Christopher is really shaking up his world. He has previously lived a contained existence in his home village. He has invented personal rules that allow him to deal with the world, and he thrives on routine—he always the same food for meals, he has colors he likes and colors he avoids, and he has special reactions that protect him when he