By Chenoah Eljan
Melbourne Fringe Festival is nothing if not an opportunity to see performance that doesn’t fit neatly into expectations, trusted form, and that is just a little bit risky – for its creators, its performers, and its audience. Instructions, presented by UK theatre company SUBJECT OBJECT is a performance of this kind of the highest order. It’s like nothing you have ever seen before, taking ideas you’ve possibly heard tossed around before, and fully bakes them.
SUBJECT OBJECT is the brainchild of Nathan Ellis, an award-winning writer and director who specialises in formally bold writing about technology and the modern world. Founded in 2021, the company has already made significant waves internationally – Instructions won a Fringe First at Edinburgh in 2024 and has toured to China. Ellis holds an MA in Playwriting from the University of London and was part of the Royal Court’s Invitation Writers’ Supergroup. His work examines the blurry lines between reality and performance, control and agency, and with Instructions, he’s created something genuinely thrilling.
The premise is deceptively simple: an actor auditions for a role in a film, reading lines from a teleprompter and listening to instructions through headphones – all for the first time, live, in front of us. But this is theatre, so of course nothing is simple. The “audition” spirals, twists, and eventually implodes in ways that are simultaneously hilarious, unsettling, and deeply moving.
Far more often than not, ‘concept’ theatre of this sort results in a trade-off between a novel device and a narrative journey. Not so for Instructions, which masterfully presents both the unique construction and a compelling story. It is well thought out and considered in every minutiae, which, given its sole performer has had no opportunity to give any of it any thought, is necessary and deeply appreciated by the audience. And, no doubt, by the intrepid actors who have put up their hands to participate.
Each performance of the show is done by a different actor. On the night this reviewer attended, Tomáš Kantor took the stage. Kantor is a multidisciplinary performer who trained at RADA before completing a BFA at VCA in 2019. They’ve built an impressive resume including Bell Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, the Australian premiere of The Inheritance, and the national tour of West Side Story. Kantor takes on Instructions with an unfazed professionalism rare for performers with twice their experience.
Kantor’s performance is nothing short of breathtaking. They are fully, completely, unflinchingly present for every single second. There’s not a moment of breaking, not a flicker of uncertainty, not even when the instructions presumably lead them into increasingly absurd territory. Watching Kantor navigate the unknown in real-time – reacting, adjusting, committing with total conviction to whatever comes next – is like watching a masterclass in trust, courage, and technical brilliance all at once. You cannot look away. The audience couldn’t look away. We were riveted.
What makes Instructions work so beautifully is its structure. Ellis has crafted a show with enough variety and momentum to keep everyone engaged without ever losing the thread of the story he’s telling. The show uses cameras, lighting shifts, and clever staging to blur the boundaries between film and theatre, reality and performance. There are moments of genuine tension, bursts of comedy, passages of genuine pathos. It builds and releases, surprises and satisfies, taking you exactly where you need to go even as it constantly questions where “there” actually is.
The technical elements are seamlessly integrated – lighting design that creates cinematic moments on stage, sound design that amplifies tension, video work that disorients and delights. Everything serves the central conceit without overwhelming it. This is smart, disciplined theatre-making that knows exactly what it’s doing and does it with confidence and flair.
By the time Instructions reaches its conclusion, you’re left with that peculiar feeling of having witnessed something rare. A performance so alive, so genuinely present, so utterly committed that it reminds you why live theatre matters. Kantor gives one of those once-in-a-festival performances that people will still be talking about years from now. I, for one, will now go see everything they put to their hand to in future. Yes, they were really that good.
But one unresolved tingling hangs in the air, sits uncomfortably with the audience. Seeing Kantor do the show feels like a preview – truly the show must be not just Kantor’s performance of it, but the juxtaposition of multiple performers embracing Ellis’s construction. To see a performance of Instructions feels like leaving a show at interval. It would come as no surprise if the audience exited the theatre only to make their way to the box office to buy tickets to see the show again. I will.
