Review: You & It (King's Head Theatre)

Review by Sam Waite

⭐️⭐️

For better or for worse, artificial intelligence continues to dominate conversations both on- and offline, and the technology is increasingly difficult to avoid. In some sectors, seemingly impossible. So it’s only natural that more and more stories with AI as a focus will be told, and that those already seen will make reappearances. It’s before this social backdrop that South Korean musical You & It makes its London debut at the King’s Head Theatre, raising a pair of questions: Can technology help to soothe the immeasurable pain caused by grief? And would this production be able to add to the heavily saturated discourse surrounding AI?

The year is 2034, and Gyujin is grieving for his wife Mina, who was pregnant with their first child when she was left comatose and eventually succumbed to the injuries caused by a car accident. In a last-ditch effort to right the world’s wrongs, he accepts the help of an unseen scientist who offers a robotic recreation of Mina, complete with her memories and personality as they were prior to her passing. Unsurprisingly, questions are soon raised not only around the viability of a virtual replacement, but of whether a synthetic Mina who shares her past but has its own future can truly emulate the Mina who Gyujin so desperately misses.

There is always a risk when translating from one language to another that words, and lyrics in particular, will lose their sense of poetic rhythm, that too direct a translation could become stilted or that too much artistic license may lose the intended meaning. Perhaps this is why You & It’s English lyrics, provided by Ricky Allan, have a habit of falling into repetition or find words rhyming with themselves. Q Lee’s music is serviceable and allows for some effective moments, but the combined musical efforts here mostly just keep things moving, and are more often than not forgotten by the time the next number begins.

On the night I attended, the role of Mina was played by Lucy Park, the production’s understudy who has gamely stepped into the role while leading lady Frances Mayli McCann recovers from an illness. A talented performer in her own right, Park brings some delightful touches of personality to the part, but it quickly becomes apparent that she is fighting an uphill battle covering McCann’s role so early into the run in a production that seems to have been firmly tailored to its leading players’ strengths and performing styles. I can only commend Lucy Park for stepping up, and compliment her for the glimpses of something truly special that peak through in her still-developping portrayal, and for the genuine warmth she brings to what could otherwise read as overly critical moments from Mina.

Gyujin is played by Zachary Pang, who brings a boyish charm to the character’s more likable moments that adds some credibility to Mina’s early musical assertion of his ‘Manchild” ways. It’s easy enough to like Pang’s Gyujin, but some questionable pacing and a vaguely drawn backstory for the character leave the weightier moments feeling slightly underbaked. His vocals are well-matched to the score, placing believable emotions behind the words even as they fall further into cliches. Crucially, the love shared between the characters is easy to believe, with a gentle, lived-in chemistry existing between Pang and Park that I would assume is shared with his work alongside McCann.

Playwright Seoeun Oh provides some strong moments of dialogue, especially when it comes to implying the established roles of Gyujin and Mina’s household, with the more slice-of-life moments being quite charming. However, on the dramatic front there is a tendency towards exposition that borders on spoon-feeding the audience, something especially prevelant in the show’s earliest scenes and which weakens the impact of a fateful revelation closer to the finale. So little is in doubt and the pace is so uneven, with the more intense sequences often seeming to come from nowhere and pass at breakneck speeds, that the potential emotional payoffs never quite come to fruition.

These pacing issues are shared by Esther Jun’s direction, the hands-off nature of which feels wise in some places and far too loosely controlled in others. At times the show, performed on and around Bob Sterrett and Lu Herbert’s simple but attractive set – complete with nicely-detailed work areas for both spouses and a believably bare kitchen table – feels as if it was created for another space, with the King’s Head’s thrust stage sometimes at odds with work that feels like it was intended for a theatre in the round. Similarly, some staging choices don’t quite work in the space, such as the numerous blackouts to cover movements – both of time and of actors – while the auditorium cannot become dark enough not every second not to be seen.

Blackouts also begin to feel like a safe fallback rather than an artistic decision, with a brief sequence of silent moments of conflict shown through strobe-like lighting add both intrigue and excitement to one transition. This one-off moment helped demonstrate not only how visually exciting the production could have been, but how much stronger lighting designer Jonathan Chan’s work may have been had he been given more opportunities to experiment. It’s hard not to wonder if this is another side effect of the aforementioned handholding of the audience found most clearly in the introductory scenes, of a determination to ensure the audience follow the material precisely as intended where their own interpretations and assumptions could in fact lead to a greater impact when revelations are... well, revealed.

You & It is not without its charms, and there is some genuine poignancy to some of the questions raised around its characters’ humanity, or lack thereof. The bones of a much stronger final product are apparent at times, and I truly do hope that the material continues to develop, and that the English language version can find the same success as the show’s initial runs in South Korea and Taiwan. This could well be an unfortunate case of a successful show from one country not meeting those same highs overseas, or perhaps with the ongoing onslaught of AI-questioning content it’s simply too hard to offer a truly fresh comment on the matter.

You & It plays at the King’s Head Theatre until September 26th. Tickets from https://allthatdazzles.londontheatredirect.com/musical/you-and-it-tickets

Photos by Danny Kaan

Production photography features Frances Mayli McCann