Theatre Review: The Robot Dog
Set in the year 2042, the play addresses questions of grief and loss (both personal and cultural) within an ultimately unsuccessful Black Mirror-esque "next five minutes" futurism, where every aspect of life is monitored and controlled by a smart-home AI called Hus.
The action, such as it is, centres around Janelle, a young Australian woman of Chinese heritage, and her partner Harry, a young Australian indigenous man. Together, they are working to clear out Janelle's deceased mother's house, a task for which the AI has assigned them a maximum of 30 days, and they are now in the last remaining 7 days of that time. Present with them is Janelle's mother's robot therapy dog, unimaginatively called Dog, who interacts with Janelle and Harry and also via private secure chat with Hus (this is used as a device to reveal Hus's agenda, such as it is).
Overall, we both thought the play missed the mark, despite having some redeeming features. In particular, the near-future setting did not add anything at all to the exploration of the themes, and in fact detracted from them by muddying the conceptual waters (eg. it seemed like the story was going to pursue the question of surveillance and what it means for a short while, but then that theme was fairly abruptly dropped). Hus, and to a lesser extent Dog, were not developed enough to seem like real entities rather than a "shooting-the-shit-at-the-pub" casual brainfart. As a technological Big Brother-esque dystopia, the play was unequivocally weak, awkward, and shallow.
The other theme that we thought was significantly undercooked was that of cultural dislocation and loss. Both Janelle and Harry are disconnected from their cultural backgrounds and this causes both of them significant, semi-acknowledged stress, which is a theme that has huge possibilities for a work of theatre ... none of which were fully realised here. The loss of language, and its artificial rectification via implant, came off as a cheap shorthand for a much more multi-faceted and complex problem, and the scene where Harry dramatically pulls out his implant read closer to farce than high drama. There were definitely moments of interest - such as when Janelle and Harry were exchanging terminology in the respective languages delivered by their implants, and sitting with the discomfort some of that entailed - but they were not nearly enough to really land the punch.
However, when it came to what I think was the play's central emotional project - Janelle's struggle with her grief over her mother's passing - there were some genuinely moving movements. Kristie Nguy brings real pathos to her portrayal of a young woman stunned and baffled by the loss of not just her mother as a person, but the cultural connection that her mother represented, however imperfectly. In some of those quieter moments, I saw glimmers of what this play could have been, if it had abandoned the gimmickry of the faux futurism and instead invested in unpacking Janelle's grieving more.
Overall, the play never rose above sitcom / soap opera level, which was a shame, because the potential was there for it to be much more. I can't in conscience give it more than 5/10, and a solid 3 of those points are for the three powerful scenes where Janelle is intensely grappling with her mother's absence.
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