While the previous evening at the Finborough Theatre worked well for us in pretty much every respect…
White Guy On The Bus by Bruce Graham, Finborough Theatre, 6 April 2018
…this evening at the Royal Court – the opening night of Instructions for Correct Assembly – did not.
We arrived at the box office to the dissonant tones of a shouty man, who apparently did not understand what a member of staff was saying to him, tearing that poor member of staff off a strip. The evening went down hill from there.
We were told that the show was approximately 110 minutes without an interval – that is a worrying sign to me. It sometimes means that the play is so absorbing, the creatives feel it best not to break the spell with an interval. But more often it means, “best not to let the audience out for an interval, they might not come back”.
The bar was overcrowded and it took an age for us to get a couple of glasses of juice ahead of the show. The crowd seemed unusually down-beat for an opening night. This all gave me a sense of foreboding, which I did not share with Janie, other than to say, “I’m not sure I’m up for these heaving theatre bars any more”.
The audience did not get less irritating when we entered the theatre. A very tall couple entered the row in front of us – the female of the pair wearing a high-hair do reaching “fairly tall gentleman in a top hat” heights. “There’s lucky”, said Janie when they sat down a few seats to the right of us – at that juncture the seats in front of us were still free. In the end, though, in front of Janie, a very fidgety man. To the left of her, the type of people who forget that they are not in their own living room. Around the place, several mobile phones went off during the show.
Here is a link to the Royal Court resource for this play/production.
Within about five minutes, I guessed that this play/production would not please either of us. At around that moment, Janie turned to me and whispered, “I’m not going to like this one – I can tell”.
What can I say about this play/production?
I had high hopes for it when we booked it. We had found an earlier Thomas Eccleshare play, Heather, at the Bush Studio, fascinating, just a few month’s ago:
But while that one was an innovative, quirky hit for us, Instructions for Correct Assembly kept missing the spot.
A couple who lost their only child in his early adulthood, try to build and train a robotic replacement.
There were some excellent lines. Eccleshare can write. The jokes when the couple did (or didn’t) turn the “opinionated dial” on the robot’s control panel were sometimes funny, although it was basically variants of the same joke several times over.
There were some excellent performers on show – their talents underused and misused on the whole. The only performance of note was Brian Vernel as the robot/druggie son.
There were some excellent illusions to assist with the creepiness of the robotic doppelganger idea – the production team clearly wanted us to experience the uncanny valley, as indeed the neighbour/friend characters get freaked out in the play.
Why the non-robotic characters were made to dance robotically during some of the scene changes is anybody’s guess.
The whole thing added up to very little in our view – a fascinating subject but a very poor play. The comedy of trying to assemble a robot much like an Ikea flat pack bed felt trite and inconsequential, while the tragedy that had befallen the family sat uncomfortably (indeed melodramatically) with the comedic element.
Below is a trailer/interview for this play/.production:
Perhaps we wouldn’t even have bothered to turn up had we watched that video in advance.
Once this show is reviewed, those reviews and other resources will be available through the search term links you can find if you click here. My guess is that those involved in the production and their loved ones would do best by not looking.
As we were leaving the auditorium, a small group of nice, older people were struggling because one of the women’s coats had got caught in the chair mechanism. We tried to help, but agreed in the end that they should wait for some assistance once the place emptied and the lights went up. The man, whom I recognised as a regular, said to me, with a twinkle in his eye, “we need the instruction manual for the chair”. Sadly, that was probably the most entertaining line of the evening.
Out in the lobby, the same shouty man from our arrival was tearing some other poor member of staff off a strip about some issue or another, this time about the exits. It was so bad, Janie remarked afterwards that she suspects that shouty man has a serious brain disorder. The irony of that notion – both with the subject matter of the play and the way we felt about the evening we’d just experienced, was not wasted on me.
Instructions for Correct Assembly is one to avoid.
Having watched the YouTube video I conclude the Producer may be someone who is on the autistic spectrum. Quirky personality at the very least!
I suppose we’re all somewhere on the spectrum and would guess that Hamish Pirie (the Director) set his quirkiness dial to maximum for effect in the video. There are certainly elements of behaviour in the play that made me think about the autistic spectrum, which I suspect explains his thinking behind the behaviours he presents. I don’t believe we have seen anything Hamish Pirie has directed before, although he started out as an assistant director at Paines Plough and the Donmar Warehouse, so we’re bound to have seen some of his handy work before.