Martin Dockery: Wide-Eyed

Martin Dockery—Creative Manitoba

Martin Dockery has been coming to the Winnipeg Fringe Festival for ten years now. Although he is still energetic and engrossing in his storytelling, it seemed to me that the level of sheer manic energy he displayed during earlier shows like The Bike Trip, some years ago, was not quite so during this show. Maybe it was because he was older and maybe it was because this was a different kind of show.

At the start of Wide-Eyed, he admits to having been vague in his Fringe Festival program description. He says this was so because he didn’t quite know at the time he submitted what material he would be presenting. He knew he would be going on a trip – somewhere – and he knew his wife would be having a baby, but he had not yet experienced these things and didn’t know what interesting things might come from them.

So he talks about his trip to Beijing, particularly to Tiananmen Square and its next-door attraction the Forbidden City. He spends a lot of time focusing on his frustration with the Forbidden City audio guide, returning to this topic often, and suggesting that he doesn’t have anything more interesting to relate from this famous site. In this, he treads the line between beating a dead horse and poking fun at himself, but safely lands on the side of being amusing.

During this show, Dockery frequently goes into digressions, some lengthy, but he always eventually comes out of each to return to the topic that spawned it. For example, when talking about the Forbidden City, he begins to talk about the friendly Chinese people he met there, the tea ceremony they invited him and his wife to, and then somehow he makes a bridge to talking about how one’s YouTube history can define oneself. Later on he reveals what the tea ceremony was really all about, and it is not so friendly. He also introduces the topic of his wife’s pregnancy, slowly at first, but it becomes one of the main topics by the end of the show. It could be easy for anyone to be lost in the details but Dockery’s enthusiasm, despite not being quite so manic anymore, and the way he fills the space in this rather small venue, keep the audience quite awake.

Konrad Antony