Chris Thorpe - Confirmation - Photo Arnim Friess

Chris Thorpe & Rachel Chavkin: Confirmation

Chris Thorpe - Confirmation - Photo Arnim FriessSeeing a chair and a microphone on a bare stage on entering the four-sided auditorium, one might be forgiven for thinking that Chris Thorpe’s interesting-sounding research project into cognitive psychology and political extremism will predominantly take the form of a lecture. He launches into it somewhat agitated, like a man who has lost patience with stupidity and bigotry, and this too seems to limit the number of possibilities as to where the show can go from this point on. A quick demonstration of how the confirmation bias works using numbers and sweets for the participating audience members. A round of handouts with the lyrics to Minor Threat’s Guilty of Being White. A summary of relevant reading around the subject. All lecture material – although delivered with the kind of flair that would have every hungover fresher entirely smitten. But then again, there are really subtle, hardly-perceptible moments of Rachel Chavkin’s direction contained in just how Thorpe handles his props, how he stresses his words as if to bring some minimalist music to it, how he elegantly swishes around the space.

As ever, Thorpe’s writing itself is enticing in its unique combination of the colloquial and the highly poetic, but despite all appearances this not a spoken word gig alone. The core of Confirmation is pure theatre in several ways. First of all there is the subject matter itself, the desire to see the world from someone else’s point of view. Any actor who has ever played a Shakespearean villain will be familiar with the necessity of accommodating intellectual and emotional complexity. Then there is Thorpe and Chavkin’s non-threatening but conceptually necessary involvement of the audience in this exercise of taking on someone else’s part, or to evoke Thorpe’s own metaphor: seeing the world through someone else’s eyes. And finally there is the sense of acute danger created by the masterfully handled levels of tension in the piece. Two thirds of the way in, I caught myself genuinely worried for Chris’s safety, which was the point at which, I realize now, the theatre actually sneaked up on all of us in an entirely novel way.

Ultimately, this is the kind of theatre that can only be made by a white, middle class, near-middle-aged man, but it is bold and subtle and stimulating and – judging by the way in which some very young audience members responded – truly life-changing too.

 

Confirmation is presented by Warwick Arts Centre and China Plate, and commissioned by Northern Stage and Battersea Arts Centre.

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About Duška Radosavljević

Duška Radosavljević is a dramaturg, writer and lecturer in Drama and Theatre Studies at the University of Kent. She is the author of Theatre-Making: Interplay Between Text and Performance in the 21st Century (2013) and editor of The Contemporary Ensemble: Interviews with Theatre-Makers (2013). She also writes for The Stage newspaper and Exeunt magazine.