Martin Dockery: Forbidden City, Concrete Drops Theatre, Fringe 2026. Photo supplied.
Martin Dockery: Forbidden City! (Stage 1, ATB Westbury Theatre)
By Fawnda Mithrush
Couched in a story about a family trip to China is the kernel of Martin Dockery’s greatest hangup: Endings.
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Beginnings are easy enough: Starting over is less painful when you haven’t spent a lot of time investing in the path. The “begin again” premise demonstrated in the show’s repeated opening sequence and ever-looping return to the instructions for the Forbidden City audio guide does start to grate on your psyche—in a good way.
It’s this cyclical stuckness that Dockery admits is the essence of all his storytelling shows; they’re just “a long series of introductions,”albeit seeded with purpose in each iterative segment. Those seeds eventually sprout into the satisfying realizations that while the path may have seemed like a strange loop, it really was taking you somewhere insightful after all.
Without unravelling the smartly-wound sweater that’s knitted here, know that any audience impatience is matched by Dockery’s own vein-pulsing exasperation; the physical and vocal effort literally scrape through each return, ramping in a way that must, you hope, eventually end in relief.
What is lovely about the ending is that it’s actually the biggest beginning of Dockery’s life, one for which he’s brilliantly unready. You don’t learn anything about the Forbidden City, after all. No one does if they stay stuck in the entry.