Review: Confirmation by Chris Thorpe

This was a challenging and thought provoking performance piece exploring confirmation-bias, our tendency to ignore evidence that does not fit our predefined views, and the writer/performer Chris Thorpe’s experiment to see if he could overcome his own bias.

He started the show with a bit of the science, using numbers to illustrate before moving on to Donald Rumsfeld’s notorious speech about “unknown, unknowns” – does this confirm to us how dumb the neocon presidency was or was it actually a brilliant encapsulation of the threats we face?

We the audience are also challenged to examine our own biases with a song that sounds like a racist rant by a skinhead band but turns out to be an anti-racist plea from the pov of a white boy experiencing racism.

Going deeper Chris Thorpe continued using the contentious issue of race, confronting his own prejudices by seeking out someone with extreme views (“Glen” who runs a White Supremacist website) listening and actually trying to understand where he was coming from.

The delivery was menacing and in-your-face as Thorpe became the character of his research, frothing and pacing but also quietly reasoning his world-view. You see “Glen” was not the one-dimensional thug we expected but a more complex person, nuanced and with surprisingly mixed ideas that didn’t conform to the stereotype.

There was black humour; our narrator wonders where he can go to have a quiet coffee without encountering Glen. The liberal Thorpe and his subject both dislike global exploiters Starbucks preferring a small independent. But Glen would use a coffee shop run by “ethnics” because they are providing a service for their community. The place he would definitely hate to go would be the Jamaican themed coffee shop run by whites!

Bravely, Thorpe dissects an infamous text on the holocaust and George Orwell’s brilliant analysis of how the language is used to manipulate thought is brought to mind with the word “denier” is now being used to close down debate in areas from climate-change to 9/11 conspiracy.

This was a highly charged piece of drama that cleverly left you thinking hard about your own way of seeing things.