the curious incident of the dog in the night-time

Fan Reviews

(All reviews contain spoilers, so don’t read if you intend to go to the play and don’t want to know anything beforehand. 🙂 )

NT Final Performance (with original cast at the Cottesloe) review by Emily, posted on 29 October 2012

A group of friends and I decided to show our support for Nicola and this wonderful production by going to both the matinee and evening performances on the last day of its current run at the Nationa’ls Cottesloe Theatre (27 October 2012). All of us have been to the show more than once before, but it didn’t matter. We simply wanted to show our love and support for the cast and crew of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time!

I have previously written a review of the live performance (which you can read HERE), so I won’t repeat myself here. Some interesting things to note about the final performance are that Luke Treadaway, Nicola and Paul Ritter were visibly upset during the last show and were even tearing up and crying a bit on stage as they did their scenes. When we met Nicola after the show, she told us that Luke started to tear up and get emotional during the scene where she was undressing him and that set her off; after that there was a lot of face wiping from those two and Paul Ritter on stage. From what we could see pretty much everyone was on their feet for a standing ovation at the end. The performance was really extra emotional and tense, they were really giving it everything they had. Also after the curtain call where Luke Treadaway did his maths equation, the rest of the cast actually came out and watched his last little bit from level 1 of the theatre. We understand that the cast were having a party afterwards at the theatre.

We sighted a number of celebrities at the matinee : Brendan Coyle, Lesley Sharp and Andrew Woodhead (former Spooks producer). I believe that Lesley Sharp must have left immediately after the show, but Brendan Coyle and Andrew Woodhead visited with Nicola backstage. Since we had already left a note for Nicola telling her that our group would be there and would appreciate a word with her, Nicola came out after she finished speaking with Brendan. We joked with Nicola that Brendan Coyle must be one of her number one fans, since he was also seen at a performance of Di and Viv and Rose last year at the Hampstead. Nicola said that she was Brendan’s number one fan too and that he was one of her favourite actors to work with.

Since Nicola knew that everyone in our group is a staunch Spooks fan, she introduced us to Andrew Woodhead by telling us that Andrew Woodhead was her favourite Spooks producer. Andrew was really glad that we all loved Spooks so much. Lucy told him that his interviews were wonderful in the Spooks DVD extras and we congratulated him on such a wonderful show. He said “thank you very much” and seemed quite pleased. When Lucy said “you’re the one who loved Harry & Ruth”, he replied (with great feeling) “Who DIDN’T love Harry and Ruth!?”

Nicola also said that she LOVED the relaxed performance of the play and that she thought it great that the NT were now doing relaxed performances for a lot of their plays after the success of that one. She was really quite proud of that achievement. [You can read a review of the relaxed performance HERE.]

The NT has now confirmed that the play will transfer to the West End in March 2013. I really hope that Nicola will be part of the transfer, but I guess it really depends on everyone’s schedules and inclinations.

Andrew Woodhead & Katie Swinden, Spooks producers, at the 2009 International Emmy Awards

Editor’s Note :

Andrew Woodhead started off as a first assistant director during the first series of Spooks. He got on so well with cast and crew and was so good at his job that Kudos eventually elevated him to the position of Executive Producer for the show. Andrew stayed with Spooks until the end of Series 8 and then moved on to work on other shows (some related to Kudos Productions).

You can read his profile on IMDb HERE.

You can see Andrew talk about Spooks in some of the DVD extras. To find out more about the Spooks DVD extras, please go to this page on our companion site, Spooks Lexicon.

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