User Manual for a Broken Machine at Bloomsbury Festival

Directed by Namoo Chae Lee, User Manual for a Broken Machine is a darkly comic and uniquely creative piece of theatre, which explores Korean identity, migration and industrialisation through the innovative use of a broken Daewoo vacuum cleaner.

KASSNA, which translates as “a woman wearing a man’s hat”, is an interdisciplinary performing arts collective that advocates for East Asian female and migrant working-class voices in the UK. The team is comprised of choreographer and visual artist Suyoung Park, who plays the “mover”; Seayool (the “player”), who composed and performs the soundscape; and Eden Jun (the “reader”), who is the voice of the play. Jun intersperses directions from the hoover’s instruction manual with a personal story of growing up in South Korea during the “pre-Gangnam Style” era, as Park agilely enacts her words onstage.

The expansive grandeur of Holy Cross Church, in which the performance takes place, gives a sort of divinity to the piece, as the audience watches from their pews. We hear snippets of news footage about the South Korean government, and the impact of the IMF on Korean life, as well as the experience of immigrating to the UK and the struggle to find work.

It is a masterclass in the versatility of a single prop, as the common household item metamorphoses throughout; one moment the vacuum cleaner is used in slapstick fashion to comedically hoover the floor beneath the audience’s feet, and the next it is completely dissected, using the nozzle as a pen, and the handle a TV screen. Parts are even robotically draped across the mover’s body, until she herself appears to become the malfunctioning machine she is trying to fix.

In its one-hour runtime, this is a thought-provoking and unsettling insight into Korean culture. The reader describes the futility of trying to function within a broken system, and asks, “What if the machine works exactly as it’s designed to, but the design is the problem?” By juxtaposing the domestic space with a broader political context, a common household object becomes a clever visual metaphor for the country’s industrialisation.

Gala Woolley
Photo: Sarah Goddard

User Manual for a Broken Machine is at Bloomsbury Festival from 9^th October until 12^th November 2026. For further information or to book, visit the theatre’s website here.