Confirmation is Chris Thorpe at his best: thought-provoking, intelligent and thoroughly absorbing.
The focus of this production is ‘confirmation bias’ – a phenomenon in psychology whereby our brains tend to favour and over-emphasise information that confirms our already held beliefs. Thorpe, a liberal, sets out to challenge his own biases by having an ‘honourable dialogue’ with someone from the opposite side of the political spectrum to himself. Thorpe actively looks for someone who ‘might agree with Anders Breivik.’ He eventually finds ‘Glen’, a white supremacist and National Socialist. The production charts Thorpe and Glen’s conversations, both real and imagined.
Thorpe is a confident performer who easily holds his audience’s attention during the 90-minute production. He involves audience members in science experiments and in reading out dialogue, ensuring they are engaged and concentrating on every aspect of this beautifully written and complex piece. Director Rachel Chavkin has cleverly blocked Confirmation in the round, on a bare stage, save for a chair and a microphone, allowing Thorpe literally “nowhere to hide” during his confessional.
Despite the extremist views the production presents, the most chilling aspect of Confirmation is that it does not allow for easy answers. Glen is no idiot cartoon villain that can be simply dismissed by the (we presume) mainly liberal audience, but nor is his complexity of character an effective balm for the extremist ideas that he espouses. Thorpe is not interested in a simple and comforting display of understanding across the political divide, but in showing what the act of understanding costs each side. The harder Thorpe tries to understand Glen, and see the world through another’s eyes, the more he has to abandon his own opinions and beliefs. It was Thorpe’s final, extreme effort to ‘understand’ Glen’s opinions that had me squirming in my seat and effectively butting heads with my own deeply held, and in many ways completely unfounded, ideas.
Confirmation is Chris Thorpe at his best: thought-provoking, intelligent and thoroughly absorbing.
