Electric Dreams

Dumbshow have taken a left-field approach to adapting Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine for the stage, though it may be fairer to say this sincere but schematic play has only taken conceptual inspiration from Klein’s controversial diagnosis of global power-play. 

Klein’s theory that the strategy of Western powers over the last century has been to create a state of continued crisis and trauma in order to render the populace subservient and unthinking is grimly persuasive, but hardly a natural fit for the stage. Dumbshow find a sort-of solution by locating the action in a library under threat of closure, which becomes the setting for several interwoven narratives of immoral medical experiments, state-sponsored torture and one woman’s struggle to make sense of it all.

The narrative focuses on a woman named Rosa, who has experienced a lifetime of amnesia following a course of brainwashing by (real-life) psychiatrist Ewen Cameron, and Sebastian, a man she meets who survived the shock doctrine of General Pinochet. By bringing these characters to the forefront of the piece, Dumbshow are able to bring heart and put faces on atrocities that could otherwise be mere statistics, but they also risk over-simplifying Klein’s thinking.

There’s some harrowing video footage to give context, but elsewhere the presentation feels naïve and the performances are frequently too broad to do justice to the concepts they handle. Everything is so neat and on the nose that it begins to look suspicious – what convinces on the page risks coming unstuck in this forceful but unnuanced staging.