Reviewing The Review and other modern meta conundrums, a guest Fringe Review by Fawnda Mithrush

The Review by Martin Dockery (Stage 18, FOH Pro Stage at the Luther Centre)

By Fawnda Mithrush

Two lawyers spar over a performance review and a questionable photo shared with one of their wives. Straightforward enough. Add a sprinkling of possibly autonomous AI and familial stakes in the firm and, well, let the entrapment themes fly.

Martin Dockery’s two-hander here is a little Philip Glass, a little Beckett, a lot of what the hell is actually happening, and why is it so frustrating and fascinating at the same time?

Dockery plays the elder lawyer being unflatteringly reviewed by a younger partner, the  deadpanning Andrew Broaddus. It’s the elder who is not keeping up with client trends, who calls out to a generic “supercomputer” instead of the updated AI Sapphire referenced by the younger  (recall the “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” campaign — there are flavours of that throughout).

The genius in the banter is not so much in the spoken words but in the tensive build: Directed by Vanessa Quesnelle, the pair’s initially rhythmic volleying spirals into an unrelenting verbal cage match. When the in-your-face dressing down of each other isn’t hurtful enough, the lawyers turn to the internet for objective verification. The smart-room AI keeps swapping the lights to match the mood, while also listening to the men lambaste each other in the most personal of ways, gathering intel for its own review of their work, their lives, their worth.

The meta magic of The Review is the calling out of review culture itself, and any industry’s reliance on it. “Not everything should be reviewed” but also “only the people in charge should do the reviews” is not how the internet works, and perhaps that’s a tricky logic to present for a crowd that’s increasingly accustomed to aggregated opinions and information.

Performance reviews can be uncomfortable. So much so that one wonders why anyone would put themselves up to be reviewed on the regular, as Fringe artists often do. Who else builds a career parsing pull-quotes and star ratings? There’s doubt that reviews should be needed, or heeded, at all. In truth, a crafty veteran’s experience outweighs whatever the shiny new LLMs are spewing; even if you haven’t read a review of Dockery’s shows in years, you can trust that the sticker price is a reliably good investment.