Unfortunately, The Dogs goes against the grain of storytelling and, as a result, its weak writing pays the ultimate price: boredom. Although Anya Reynolds-Swannie's performance is expressive, I felt absolutely disengaged from the nonsensical, tedious story that was failing, time and again, to unfold in front of me.

It's a pity is this show has the potential of something interesting, but it keeps falling short when it fails to establish simply what it wants to do. Chief among the writing sins here is private symbolism—in this regard, there's a world of difference between gradually and carefully unfolding the plot for the audience and keeping them in the dark to the last; ultimately, only the writer knows what the heck all this adds up to, and this outsourcing of rhetorical labour, which the show attempts to throw over the fence to the audience, simply doesn't cut it. There was nothing here for me to be invested in.

Next comes the slew of issues caused by the show's committment to telling us everything while mostly showing us nothing. If we weren't kept in the dark by the rambling, disjointed plot, this could perhaps work. However, I simply don't see how it's possible to neither flesh out what the audience is seeing nor actually push the physical elements of the narration further, into the realm of showing. From the Stanislavskian perspective, since I was already uninterested in the plot, I was even further out to sea in terms of the onslaught of words that seemed to barely connect to what the protagonist was doing. From the Brechtian perspective, I was more aware than aware that I was in a theatre, watching a meandering play that was taking forever and going nowhere.

What was the purpose of the torn shoulder? The wound? The stringing along of the audience by means of foreshadowing that ultimately adds up to nothing? The Chekhov's gun that never fires? I'm all for experimental theatre and breaking established conventions, but I felt rather dispirited while watching this performance—full of sound of fury, signifying nothing. Before the fans come for me, do kindly inquire with yourselves: Did you actually enjoy the show because it spoke to you? (If so, then, for the love of God, do tell what it had to say.) Or, did you simply feel a little enthralled because an actor let out passionately a sequence of words that you did not fully understand?