The character of Christopher Boone in The Curiouts Incident of the Dog in the Night Time will be my main inspiration for my performance. I want to create a character that is similar to Christopher as I find that his character is very interesting. Christopher has a lot of quirks that many people wouldn’t consider ‘normal’. But these quirks are simply his Asperger’s coming through; he likes everything to be in order and even so that it is easier for himself to understand the situation that he’s in or for him to understand the world around himself.
The sort of aspects I like about Christopher are that he is very exact about most things he says: ‘It was 7 minutes after midnight’, ‘My name is Christopher John Francis Boone. I know all the countries of the world and their capital cities and every prime number up to 7,507’, ‘I am 15 years and 3 months and 2 days’ (Haddon, 2003, 1-7). There’s also the idea of hoe he takes things very literally or how he can never lie. An example of how he can never lie is when a policeman is asking him questions. We as the reader know he didn’t kill the dog, however the questions he’s asked are because the owner of the dog believes that Christopher killed the dog. To be fair, it would look very suspect if he’s stood there with a dead dog in his arms.
The other aspect of Christopher’s personality, which is something that I believe is similar in those with Asperger’s, is that he can’t necessarily take in a whole amount of information at a time; he would prefer it to be simpler and have a bit of information at a time rather than being confused and being told lots of different things at the same time: ‘He [a policeman] was asking too many questions and he was asking them too quickly’ (Haddon, 2003, 8). I just like how simple he wants things or makes things himself.
These certain aspects of his personality are what I would like to take as an influence. The one thing I would like to try out is that I would like to add certain aspects of OCD to my character too. There’s one video on YouTube that I was shown which is a guy with OCD which is just incredibly beautifully and is something that I think I could also take inspiration for my character from.
(Button Poetry, 2013)
It’s the thoughts that he has and the actions he that he talks about that I like about this video. Even when he has to repeat things a certain amount of times, it’s beautiful; the story and everything he talks about, there’s an air of poetry about it.
Works Cited:
Button Poetry (2013) Neil Hilborn – “OCD” (Rustbelt 2013) Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnKZ4pdSU-s [accessed 12 March 2016].
Haddon, M. (2003) The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. London: Vintage.