Mark Haddon: ‘The London theatre world is so much more alive than contemporary fiction’

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is the novel that changed the life of its creator, Mark Haddon. As the bestseller’s stage adaptation transfers to the West End, he tells David Sexton why moving from books to the world of plays is what really excites him
Mark Haddon Pic:Matt Writtle
13 March 2013

It looks like Mark Haddon is about to have a great big success all over again. The hit play of his bestselling 2003 novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, adapted by Simon Stephens, opens tonight at the Apollo in the West End, having transferred from the National.

Luke Treadaway reprises the pivotal role of 15-year-old Christopher, “a mathematician with some behavioural difficulties” who uncovers the broken relationships in his own family while all the time thinking he is tracking down the killer of a neighbour’s dog.

Tickets are selling “really fast”, says Haddon. “We may have a War Horse on our hands.”

Yet when I suggest to him that this means the book will be making him a second fortune, he makes a little noise of surprise, puffing out air between his lips. “I haven’t even thought of that,” he says. And however surprising that may seem, it soon becomes clear that it’s the truth. “It’s sold so many anyway. Enough to keep me happy for a very long time.”

Haddon is in the unusual position for a writer of not having to care about that sort of success any more. When we meet, he is dressed like your average north London middle-aged scruff: plaid shirt, fleece, jeans, walking shoes, toting a North Face book bag.

What does it for him is the writing itself — at the moment, writing for the theatre particularly. He tweets energetically as well as blogging about what he’s doing. It was on Twitter he recently announced: “I’ve given up writing novels. I’m writing plays at the moment. So much better for the immortal soul.”

He says: “One of the things I really like about the London theatre world at the moment is that it’s much more alive than contemporary fiction. You get the feeling that genuinely exciting things are happening — and there just aren’t the same category barriers. We think nothing of going to a certain theatre on successive weeks and seeing, I don’t know, Alan Ayckbourn and then Roy Williams. I think theatre-goers are very willing to see a whole range of plays — and ironically, in fiction, where there are no physical barriers, no physical rooms to sit in, I think those categories are much harder to leap out of.”

He also loves the involvement and response that theatre requires: “It is great to be involved with other people who take writing seriously. You have all these talented, committed people, you have a big audience — and if you get it wrong then it hurts so much more than a bad review. I like having my back pressed against a wall and being made to work harder so I don’t embarrass myself.”

In comparison, writing fiction can be a lonely business, “a bit like being long-term unemployed — you know, you’re hanging around in the day with nothing to do, going from one café to another — although luckily I have more money than I would do if I were long-term unemployed.”

He repeatedly acknowledges that fact. Last year, he wrote to his MP to say he himself should be paying more tax because “austerity measures introduced by the Coalition have caused real suffering to many people but my comfortable life hasn’t changed in the least”.

He lives in Oxford with his wife, English lecturer Sos Eltis, and their sons aged 12 and nine. “I lived in Hackney for a number of years but I couldn’t do it again. I need big open space regularly. There’s something rather wonderful about the fact that Oxford is a very small city that contains most of the cultural and metropolitan facilities you could want, in terms of bookshops, theatre, cinema, conversation. But it’s near enough to London to get here in an hour, and it’s near enough to huge open spaces without which I would go insane.”

His plea to pay more tax didn’t recruit many other volunteers. “I got lots of messages of support and some abuse. But I didn’t get a single message of support from another wealthy person. They were conspicuously silent. At the time, it seemed such a blindingly obvious thing to say. I was really shocked by how peculiar people thought it was. I’m still shocked and very sad.”

He is currently campaigning for the National Health Action party, believing it to be “the most important issue in British politics at the moment”, and, for his own part, after paying his tax, he donates heftily to Oxfam.

Yet the worldwide sales of Curious Incident haven’t solved all his problems. “Yes, for better or worse, it’s my golden ball and chain, isn’t it? Anybody who does anything that’s incredibly successful gets attached to it. One problem is that it doesn’t give you anything to do the following morning. From the outside, it looks as if you have this thing that is going to buoy you up, give you confidence, give you substance for your life. But you have to go home and sit in front of a blank piece of paper again, irrespective of what you’ve done before.”

Virginia Woolf’s stream of consciousness style remains his touchstone. One reviewer said that his most recent novel, The Red House, about a stressful family holiday in Wales, was “Virginia Woolf with masturbation and mobile phones”, a verdict he seems happy enough with.

“I think Woolf becomes more important as time goes on, because a lot of the novels she was reacting against — these great lumbering male narrative novels of the 19th century — have been taken over by what you might call HBO television. Who’s going to put The Wire on paper? The modern city is so complex and layered and multivalent, it’s so hard to do it on paper. But I think what she does remains something that no other form is really going to be able to touch.”

Later, worried that he hasn’t made himself clear on this subject, in the context of stage as well as television, he sends a knotty email developing the thought further: “What the novel is able to articulate about existing in the first person, theatre can articulate about living in the third person.”

Haddon is a worrier in general. Another current project is an hour-long performance, Swimming and Flying, shortly to become a “Kindle single” e-book, about his fear of swimming in deep water and flying. “Obviously I have a capacity for feeling extreme anxiety and there are people out there who don’t. I’m to some extent rather jealous of them.” But he doesn’t think phobias always have a psychological explanation; they just arise. “It’s waiting for all of you out there!,” he says with a little flash of aggression.

Similarly, he doesn’t like it being suggested that he has a particular understanding of the troubles of the hero of Curious Incident, Christopher Boone, somewhere on the Asperger’s spectrum. “No, it wasn’t a case of understanding. What I did was write down a small number of rules he would live his life by — I think we all have a number of rules we live our lives by … I thought of him as not that different from everyone else, just a bit eccentric. And I wrote him as you’d write any other character.

“When people say to me, ‘I’m amazed you could get into his character’, I want to say I feel prouder of having got into the character of a teenage lesbian in The Red House. Come on! Give me some credit for that instead, I’ll swap the two.”

I recall that when I reviewed the book, I said that though the female characters were well-formed, Haddon remains a writer most at home delineating male limitations and boyish recourses. “No, no, that’s fine,” he says amicably — he is just the nicest man, to get that clear.

Christopher Boone, famously, is 15 years and three months and two days old, and looks like he will be so for ever now on the stage as well as the page. Mark Haddon is 50. “I suspect like most people I’ll be on my deathbed thinking, I never did get round to growing up, did I? But that’s better than the opposite.”

The Red House is published by Vintage in paperback on April 25; The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time is at the Apollo Theatre, W1 (020 7492 9930, apollotheatrelondon.co.uk) booking until August 31.

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