REVIEW: Woof - What If Dogs Don’t Think Like Us?
Review Date: 19th June 2026 @Etcetera Theatre
REVIEWS
Zoe Yingying Xie
6/22/20262 min read
©️Woof
Woof is a gentle and charming 50-minute two-hander with a beautifully simple premise. Through Pup, a curious young dog, and Old, an older dog quietly waiting by the door, the play asks us to rethink love, loyalty and companionship across species.
The opening is immediately engaging. Pup’s excitement at “having” a human is funny, sweet and full of potential. The production itself is handled with warmth and ease. The direction and movements feel natural and fluid, while both performers capture the physicality of dogs with lovely detail. The cosy domestic set and props also create a soft, familiar world that is easy to enter.
However, after such a bright beginning, the script struggles to find enough variation. Its central ideas are established early, but the conversations soon begin to circle around similar emotions. There is not quite enough shift, tension or surprise to keep the premise developing, so the play starts to lose some of its initial freshness.
Playwright Philippine Fauchier-Magnan clearly intends to explore the ways in which humans shape, control, and project feelings onto animals. Yet this exploration inevitably raises a fundamental question that the production never fully answers: whose voice is the audience actually hearing?
Dogs do not experience the world in the same way humans do. Even their sense of colour is different from ours. If their senses are so different, can we really assume that their ideas of love, loyalty, loss or morality would work like ours?
At times, Woof feels less like a story told from a dog’s perspective, and more like human thoughts placed inside a dog’s body. It seems to assume that dogs would understand their own emotions through a human value system. This assumption carries a kind of human-centred tenderness. The emotions are sincere, but they can also become self-comforting, as if the play is moved by its own idea of what dogs must feel.
Ultimately, the most compelling aspect of Woof lies not in what it confidently asserts, but in what it cannot truly know. How a dog understands absence, time, death, or love remains a mystery. Embracing that very "not-knowing" might offer a more profound creative exploration than attempting to speak for them too confidently.
Still, Woof remains a warm and thoughtful piece. The direction is gentle, the performances are vivid and endearing, and the domestic world it creates feels full of affection. Even if the script does not fully escape a human-centred view, it still asks us to look again at the lives waiting for us by the door.
★★★
For more information, please visit: https://www.etceteratheatrecamden.com/events/woof
Credits:
Writer: Philippine Fauchier-Magnan
Director: Haonan Wang
Marketing and Publicity Producer: Madeleine Bloxam
Movement Director: Kuba Pawelczak
Set and Costume Designer: Livia Deng
Sound Designer: Tara Jamora Oppen
Lighting Designer: Xuan Ge (Luka)
Stage Manager: Leanne Lim
Cast:
Old: Andrew Vose
Pup: Philippine Fauchier-Magnan
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