Flora Gosling
- Aug 8
- 2 min read

Review: Instructions (Summerhall)

Celebration of liveness shoots itself in the foot

“Dance, monkey, dance!” Most performances disguise the more humiliating parts of being an actor. Behind the scenes, when a director says jump, the actor asks how high. And there’s a good reason for this – the more willing the actor is to experiment, to loosen up, to let go of ego, the better they will be at finding the character they are trying to portray. But in SUBJECT OBJECT’s Instructions, written by Nathan Ellis, things are not as they seem. Each day the show is performed by a new actor, completely unprepared for what is expected of them. A screen relays instructions on what to say and what to do, and they perform a play about an actor who is told they have landed a big role in a movie, but mysteriously they don't hear about it again. Today our actor is Brandon.

As bold as the concept may be, it is not dissimilar to Ellis’s 2022 outing Work.txt, which didn’t even have an actor and instead gave instructions to the audience. It was a breathtaking show, and a similar idea reimagined with a new purpose is very welcome. Unfortunately, this time around Ellis struggles to tie the concept to the themes. Instructions plays with liveness in a way that would wet the lips of theatre students, but its format means that, by design, the actor cannot give their best performance. “Alex, it’s me” Brandon is told to say. Now say it flirtatiously, now say it in French, now say it like a cowboy. As we learn this is all an exercise in copying his likeness so that he can appear in the film without ever having to appear on set. Unfortunately, because Brandon has no context for the film and his character in it, he cannot demonstrate the value of real acting. It is hard to be invested in the fight against AI when the performance in front of you is, forgive me, a glorified comedy improvisation performance.

Photo Credit: Alex Brenner

It is also unfortunate that the conversation around AI is constantly outpacing theatre’s ability to react to it. The issue is far from resolved, but Ellis’s dystopia seems retrofuturist when copyright law, transparency around AI, and a landmark victory in the Screen Actors Guild strike have changed the landscape. Instructions' experimental style will delight a lot of audiences, but in a conversation about “AI, creativity, and the dying days of capitalism”, it feels stale. Two stars.