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by Martin Dockery

Martin Dockery, Toronto Fringe Festival, Al Green Theatre, Toronto

July 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 11 & 12, 2014

           

There is an image in The Dark Fantastic, Martin Dockery’s surreal tale from 2012, that sums up the nature of the entire story.  A man and woman seek out the orphanage where the woman had given up her baby for adoption and where he still lives.  Dockery tells us that the vines were so overgrown that the vines were growing on other vines. 

That’s exactly the feeling you get when listening to Dockery’s narration that seems to double back on itself using its own fantastic images as frameworks for the growth of more fantastic images.  Dockery’s starting point is the description of a car crashing in the middle of the desert, its passengers a man with a shiny nose and metallic short shorts, a woman who is afraid to look in the back seat and in the back seat a boy with two hearts, his hands tied behind his back because is he known to be prone to violent deeds.  The boy’s attack on the driver is what causes the car to go off the road and into and out of a ditch and go flying, its occupants momentarily weightless, before it crashes to the ground. 

Dockery delivers this introduction in pitch blackness.  Gradually a light shows he is wearing a cowboy hat but still his face is obscured.  He seems to be the old man in his story who wants everyone he meets, including us, to remember his story so that something of him will live on until the sun consumes the earth. 

When Docker suddenly shifts the locale of the action from the desert, to that of a high rise office building the background lighting that had been bright red turns blue and Dockery takes off his hat finally revealing his face.  His hands and arms which had been motionless now gracefully move in illustration of every aspect of his new story.  In contrast to the insidious atmosphere of doom that pervaded the desert story, the office story begins as comic.  A young woman, only the second employee in the building, discovers that the brand-new photocopier is jammed and she is certain that the only other employee in the office must be responsible.  When she confronts the male employee, he denies it and she remarks “Well, Rome wasn’t built in a day”, a remark that causes them both to laugh uproariously. 

Why is this remark so funny?  As Dockery explains, it turns out that Rome actually was built in exactly one day.  His explanation of how this happened is a tour de force of storytelling in the midst of a monologue that is itself a tour de force of storytelling.  The tale is in many ways the key to Dockery’s entire monologue.  The “history” of Rome is nothing more than an extraordinarily elaborate lie that that has been passed down through generations.  That is, of course, exactly what the old man’s story is that he wants to be continually passed down from one teller to the next. 

Dockery’s extravagant tale of the backgrounds of each of the three people in the car and how they all came to be together is, of course, a fiction.  The driver of the car made his living as an artist who used projectile regurgitation as way of creating art.  Through this comically gross image Dockery satirizes retelling stories as art.  He thus both constructs and deconstructs his story as he tells it. 

Dockery’s words make something fantastic happen in the midst of a desert, but once his story is over he makes us question what it is.  The story’s structure is circular, forming a self-contained loop, suggesting that although it uses references to the world outside the story, it is primary self-referential.  Dockery’s narration exerts the eerie force of entrapping us as if we were being sucked into a void.  And for Dockery words and stories seem to be all that we have to disguise the presence of the void all around us, the “dark” of the title.  The uncanniness of the experience is enhanced by an electronic score that accompanies Dockery’s entire narration delivered while seated at a mic.     

The phrase “light fantastic” comes from John Milton’s ode L’Allegro (1645) set in a verdant pastoral landscape.  Dockery’s story is set in just the opposite landscape, but a theme from Milton informs his story.  In Milton the narrator wants to feel the joy of becoming one with art:

        And ever against eating cares,

        Lap me in soft Lydian airs,

        Married to immortal verse

        Such as the meeting soul may pierce (lines 135–138)

 

The old man narrator of Dockery’s story wishes for the same thing, except that when all the words have done is to build a construct in the midst of a void, we shudder to become one with them.  Indeed, the image of a heart pierced during the car crash is gruesome rather than beautiful.   

The Dark Fantastic is powerful and disturbing experience.  It may be humorous and grotesque along the way, but it leaves us with the odd sensation of exhilaration and claustrophobia as if we had been drawn into a wormhole that has just closed on us and been transported to a place infinitely far from anything familiar.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photos: Martin Dockery in The Dark Fantastic. ©2013 KH Photographics. 

For tickets, visit http://fringetoronto.com.