Instructions for Correct Assembly, written by acclaimed British playwright Thomas Eccleshare, is currently premiering in Sydney. Beneath the blackly comedic veneer of this witty satire is a philosophical core, at once moving and profoundly unnerving.
Presented by Clock & Spiel Productions, Eccleshare’s original is masterfully translated for the Australian stage in a way that brings even more hilarity and discomfort in 2025. As director Hailey McQueen said in an interview with Honi Soit, “What was once a quirky thought experiment — “what if you could build the perfect child?” — now lands with unnerving proximity to real-world questions about technological interference, control, and emotional outsourcing.”
Max and Hari appear to be a normal Sydney couple. They live in the suburbs, they feign politeness to their neighbours, and the big ambitions from their youth have faded and settled to a mellow form of contentedness. The staging enhances the production’s commentary on suburban life: the well-lit, overwhelmingly white interiors of Max and Hari’s home reflect a sense of order and composure, while simultaneously evoking sterility and an anxiety to conform to social expectations.
The play’s focus on dichotomies, such as the real versus the artificial and human versus non-human, is foreshadowed through the arrangement of various props in pairs on the stage. Despite the play’s original British setting, McQueen notes that “satire speaks fluent suburbia, no matter the country.” By shifting the setting to an Australian context, replete with references to 90+ ATARs and little Amy off to USyd, Eccleshare’s social commentary is brought closer to home, reflecting “our anxieties, our ambitions, and the extreme lengths we go to keep things looking perfect on the outside.”
Max and Hari’s decision to purchase a flat-pack, ‘Build It Yourself’ S-O-N by the name of Jån begins as an amusing if perturbing joke. The couple construct their IKEA-esque child part by part, making ample use of a remote control to dial up or down aspects of Jån’s personality. Jane Wallace (Max) and Nick Curnow (Hari) captured the dynamic between the two with natural ease and authenticity. Eccleshare’s writing is quick, sharp and cutting — there were many laugh-out-loud moments from the audience when Jån’s software ‘glitched’ and he launched into tirades about how “the modern liberal movement has taken positive discrimination too far,” or his plans to open a bubble tea shop as a front to sell vapes to fourteen-year-olds.
The play progresses through episodic scenes framed by light changes. This episodic structure gradually shifts from a fast-paced series of comedic scenes verging on a sitcom, to the carrier of tension and foreboding as the implications of trying to engineer love as a premium product are revealed. They also slowly reveal the reasons for Max and Hari’s decision to purchase Jån in the first place, as we learn they recently lost their first child Nick to drug addiction.
Actor Ben Chapple portrays both Nick and Jån, with an adept capacity to convey the humorous and poignant aspects of their stories with equal veracity. As McQueen told Honi, the dual casting choice written into Eccleshare’s script “lays the foundation for so much of the audience’s emotional and philosophical unease.” Enhanced by the episodic structure that brings the two boys nearly side by side without ever having them meet, having the same actor play both Nick and Jån ‘blurs the line between what was real and what is reassembled,’ interrogating how a desire to construct and perfect for the sake of comfort can be at the expense of emotional authenticity and personal agency, which is the complex and messy fabric of human reality.
Previous UK productions of the show faced criticism for their treatment of Nick’s character and his addiction. One reviewer felt that neither the onset nor the deterioration of Nick’s illness is ever adequately explained, providing insufficient emotional evidence or ‘believability’ to support the play’s philosophical claims. Is there an implication, for example, that Nick’s addiction stemmed from the stifling atmosphere of silent competition that pervades his suburban environment, where parents laud their children’s school successes as evidence of the superiority of their family’s lifestyle? Is Max and Hari’s parenting under scrutiny here?
I understand these misgivings. Drawing out Nick’s character in more detail, dwelling on his internal motivations and reasonings, would have provided a more complex portrait of his personality, and also of the nature of perfection. Chapple would have portrayed this deftly. In one of Nick’s few solo scenes, he captures the mental tug of war between the hold of Nick’s illness and his genuine desire for change. Hands unsteady from withdrawal, he packs and unpacks a bag in his childhood bedroom while contemplating leaving his parents’ house again. Moments like these provide a more personal and emotional reflection on the play’s conceptual considerations and I would have liked more of them. They enhance the idea that the search for perfection is ironically self-defeating and even self-destructive, and in this way provide a parallel with Jån’s trajectory and complement the dual casting.
However, I also think that this need to know everything is one of the (very human) impulses that the play is writing against. The reality is, monumental and traumatic life events often lack a clear explicable cause, which only makes them more difficult to deal with. At the beginning of the play, Max attempts to console her disbelief at her son’s illness by rationalising, “It’s not anything you’ve done…It could happen to anyone.” And it could. Why do people become addicted to drugs? Why do people die? The play is less concerned with trying to draw out complex, psychologically believable answers to these questions than it is with dealing with the fact that terrible things happen in human life. Its focus is on learning to deal with pain in an authentic and non-self destructive way that embraces our capacity for grief rather than vilifying and trying to escape it.
Ultimately, this production is a testament to the ongoing value of independent theatre in a world that is increasingly contrived and artificial. Despite its proficiency in email-writing, essay-writing, and even child-making, artificial intelligence technology cannot capture authenticity. It cannot capture relationships, and it also cannot capture mess beyond its own hallucinations. This is because it is predicated on achieving perfection, which is something that humans — nor their art — can ever be. The more we try to run from that, the less human, and the less fulfilled, we become. Perhaps, as McQueen says, theatre is one of the last places left where we can be “unpolished, unpredictable, and fully human, on purpose.”
Instructions for Correct Assembly will show until 5th July at the Flight Path Theatre in Marrickville. Tickets are available for purchase here.
