I Heart IKEA[author-post-rating] (1/5 Stars)

Although Illyria Arts has come up with a romantic comedy which is markedly different, it is too hollow and too strained to justify the experiment. I Heart IKEA was written by finding popular quotes about love and romance and using them to assemble an overall story. This becomes incredibly formulaic, incredibly fast.

It is a shame because the fundamental idea is a good one. The play is essentially a collage, bemoaning the difficulty of originality by composing a show entirely from rehashed film lines, song-lyrics and clichés, with sources ranging from Casablanca to ‘Call Me Maybe’.

Said quotes are delivered as though they are being recited from an IKEA instruction manual, hence the title. This is the most potentially fruitful avenue in the play, and begs to be explored in more depth than it is. I think this show wants to explore the way that popular culture, the mass media and the Hollywood dream-factory influence our own perception of love and romance almost like a step-by-step romance guide, from the friend-zone to happy endings; it just severely lacks the poignancy to do so.

The reason for this is that the show’s own novelty premise constricts it. It is hard to invest anything in an hour-long plot when both characters are little more than soundboards for famous phrases. Obviously the plot is intentionally generic, consisting of a couple acting out every clichéd scenario in every clichéd rom-com, but it wears quickly. As a ten-minute sketch this premise might have been hilarious, but stretched out over the course of an hour it quickly becomes annoying, with rare laughs usually being triggered by a favourite quote surfacing amongst the wreckage.

The duo’s acting sometimes blurs the line between deadpan and unconvincing, never more so than during an agonising five minute sequence where each awkwardly cradles an IKEA lamp on opposite sides of the stage while Bonnie Tyler’s ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ plays. Possibly the venue, which I found rather hostile, hampers their performance; Zoo Southside’s Cabaret Room squashes the stage right into a corner and although the space has a capacity of 60, it doesn’t feel as though it could house more than about 15.

That said it is an astounding feat that both actors somehow remembered their lines. Learning a script consisting of phrases that were originally hammered into the  long-term memory years ago, and which shed their semantic weight each of the many times one has heard them ever since, must require a total mental reshuffle.

As impressive as this is, it does not make the show any easier to watch. Perhaps is might be possible to make an hour-long, funny, engaging play out of an entire hour’s worth of recycled words, but this is not it.

I Heart IKEA is playing until 14th August. For more information and tickets, see the Edinburgh Fringe website.