A 'cultural' outing with friends organised at New Year very pro-actively for Saturday 21st March. I had read the book back in 2004 when everyone was reading it on the tube and there were posters on all the stations (same time at the Da Vinci Code). I had enjoyed it then, and heard good things about it as a play, although when it came to the evening I realised that all I remembered was that the boy was autistic, there was a dead dog, he got the tube on the northern line and the chapters were numbered in prime numbers. So it was quite enjoyable just from a learning the story point of view. It was also amazing in terms of theatre. The set was like the inside of a huge black box. There were lots of lights on it, looking a bit like going in to the abyss in Star Tours. They lighted up cleverly at different points to make different staging. And I wasn't sure how it would transfer from book format to play, but they had a teacher reading Christopher's writing which worked well. There were some stand out set bits including the opening of the pit to be the tube line, walking down the escalators that came out of the wall, and Christopher spend a long time building a train track and then the train suddenly started moving! Lots of people gave it a standing ovation which was well deserved. After the curtain call, Christopher came back to explain Pythagoras' theorem which was a joke that had been made during the show and was funny and well received! Various chairs in the auditorium had covers on them and little cards saying that Christopher had designated them prime number seats. It said if your name added up to a prime number then you could go and get a prize and John was brave enough to do it. It turned out both our names are prime numbers!
It was at the Gielgud Theatre where it had moved to after the roof of the theatre fell in on the night i went to see Cats.
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