I Heart IKEA aims to explore the idea of love being achievable via a handbook, evoking love’s unpredictability and the pain it can bring. In reality, it is an utterly charmless and enormously aggravating love story which fails to deliver on any of these goals.
The characters are extremely under-developed, which makes it impossible for us to sympathise with their story. Since the show starts with the meeting of the two characters, we have no understanding of how the event changed them or feel any sympathy with them as individuals. We never find out anything about their pasts or even their personalities, leading to a spectacular lack of audience engagement. It was very difficult to root for them or care what happened in their story because of the two dimensional way in which they are written.
About 80 percent of the abhorrently cheesy dialogue consists of famous lines from film, music and literature. This got a few laughs at the start, but the joke very quickly wore thin. It should also be noted that wooden delivery of the opening lines from ‘You’re The One That I Want’ was not enough to convey panic and despair effectively and completely undermined the characters’ emotions. The entire story became a total joke and any serious moments fell totally flat. After the first ten minutes of this ridiculous style of dialogue the play became extremely irritating and the characters were very easily hated.
Lack of sympathy with the story was not helped by its unconvincing actors. Delivery was completely wooden, which is especially surprising considering that its male lead also wrote the show and ought to have the passion properly to portray his own creation. Facial expressions rarely changed, making it difficult to gauge what the characters, and by extension their audience, were meant to be feeling. Both actors’ eyes were unfocused and constantly shifted from place to place, never stopping to make contact with the audience’s gaze in moments of direct address or to look at each other during their dialogue. The male lead spent most of his time looking at the ground, rendering him impossible to read.
One scene was so bizarre and awkward that I feel it requires mention; the two leads each picked up an IKEA lamp from their set and proceeded to treat it like a lover. This was a hugely misguided attempt at representing their feelings for each other that made me very uncomfortable. Interacting with inanimate objects can be understandable but in this context, spooning and making out with a lamp definitely was not.
Awkward and extremely cringeworthy, everything about I Heart IKEA is abysmal.
