THE National Theatre’s multi-award-winning production of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is making its Southampton debut at Mayflower Theatre on June 23, where it will run for two weeks until July 4.

It is directed by the Tony and Olivier award-winning Marianne Elliott, who co-directed War Horse, which played to packed houses at Mayflower Theatre last year.

Now, in line with National Autism Week this week, the Mayflower has announced that it will be hosting the only relaxed performance on the 31-venue tour, on July 2 at 2pm.

The relaxed performance is presented in association with the National Autistic Society and has been specifically designed to welcome people who will benefit from a more relaxed environment, including people on the autism spectrum, with sensory and communication difficulties, or a learning disability.

There will be a relaxed attitude to noise and movement and some small changes made to the light and sound effects. It has previously been described as ‘the opposite of the quiet carriage on the train’.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time received seven Olivier Awards in 2013, including Best New Play, Best Director, Best Lighting Design and Best Sound Design, and is simultaneously running at the Gielgud Theatre in London and on Broadway as well as touring the UK and Ireland.

Playwright Simon Stephens said about adapting Mark Haddon’s novel for the stage: “The adaptation was a really joyful experience. I knew two things before adapting the play. I knew that the key to it was the relationship between Christopher and his teacher.

Although it’s not that central in the novel, what struck me was that everybody in life has a favourite teacher.

Even people who hated school, even people who found school a miserable experience, had one teacher who they loved more than others and got them in a way that other teachers didn’t.

I knew that if I could get that relationship right, then we could create an evening in the theatre that people could recognise themselves in.

“The other thing that I knew was that Marianne Elliott had to direct it. I think she’s a visionary director, I think she’s a director of extraordinary imagination, but she’s also a very democratic director.

This can’t be a piece of theatre that alienates people. It has to be a piece of theatre that you can come to if you’re ten years old or if you’re 90 years old. It needs to appeal to people that have very high art taste in theatre, but also it’s got to be a family night out, and I thought that Marianne could realise that really beautifully and really perfectly.

“Everybody working on it, the entire creative team, were united in wanting to tell Christopher’s story as honestly and properly as possible.

All I ever wanted to do was to make Mark Haddon happy. He came to see rehearsals and the previews and the show at the National and in the West End and Broadway and he fell back in love with Curious Incident all over again.

That makes me as proud as anything.’

Author Mark Haddon added: “When I wrote Curious Incident I was absolutely convinced that it couldn’t be adapted for film or stage. The novel is one person’s very insulated and sometimes profoundly mistaken view of the world. We’re stuck inside Christopher’s head from cover to cover. We see the world the way he sees the world. And there’s the problem. Or so it seemed to me.

“Theatre is radically third person.

You can infer what people are thinking but you can do so only from what they say and what they do. I simply couldn’t imagine how Christopher’s story could be told with any integrity in this way.

Simon’s genius was to recognize that I was completely and utterly wrong.”

The show tells the story of Christopher Boone, who is 15 years old. He stands besides Mrs Shears’ dead dog, which has been speared with a garden fork, it is seven minutes after midnight and Christopher is under suspicion.

He records each fact in a book he is writing to solve the mystery of who murdered Wellington.

He has an extraordinary brain, and is exceptional at maths while ill-equipped to interpret everyday life. He has never ventured alone beyond the end of his road, he detests being touched and distrusts strangers. But his detective work, forbidden by his father, takes him on a frightening journey that upturns his world.

Tickets from Mayflower Theatre on 023 8071 1811 or mayflower.org.uk.