Three To A Room's Edinburgh and Melbourne Season 2008
I Love You, Bro Reviews
1. Robin Barton for Broadway Baby (13th August)
2. Oliver Farrimund for FestMag (13th August)
3. Beth Friends for What's On Stage Scotland (11th August
4. Geoff for One 4 Review (13th August)
5. John Bailey for RealTime Arts
6. DM for FringeReview (6th August)
7. Duska Radosavlijevic for The Stage Edinburgh (4th August)
9. Greer Ogston for The List (14th August)
Mommie & the Minister Reviews
1.Matt Boothman for The List (7th August)
2.Thom Dibdin for The Stage Edinburgh (14th August) - Stage Must See!
3.Jo Bedford for FestMag (13th August)
1. Robin Barton for Broadway Baby
In his program notes writer Adam J A Cass remarks this one-person show is based on “a boy who is out there somewhere”, the “out there” being cyber space. Though based on a true story, he says that this can only be his, the director's (Yvonne Virslk) and the actor's (Ash Flanders) version of events. No matter – what a version, and what incredible events.
Johnny is a bored, sad and lonely fourteen year old who lives with his dull, submissive mum and her abusive partner, Trevor. Like all such teenagers since time began he retreats to his bedroom at every opportunity, but unlike such teenagers up until a decade ago, the four walls of such bedrooms are not confining any more. The world is at the end of a keyboard and web cam.
Though he professes to be straight Johnny enjoys flirting with another, slightly older boy in a chat room, then realise that this other lad believes him to be a girl. Intrigued and turned on by Marky, Johnny doesn't disabuse him, and instead gets Marky, who believes he is performing for a girl, to abuse himself on webcam. Johnny is instantly in love, but how to meet the love of his life?
It's only giving away a little of the plot to tell you he does manage to meet him, posing as the “girl's” step-brother., but to say any more would be to spoil the myriad of twists, turns, and surprises this hour long show provides.
The script is brilliant, combining youth-speak, web-speak and not a little lyricism. The direction is well paced, but the afternoon belongs to Flanders who is just astonishing. He started a bit fast, and was hard to understand at first (his accent seems to meander across hemisphere's at times!) but once he is into his stride he is mesmeric, funny, heartbreaking and at times really frightening.
And I guess that's really what this tale is about. The internet, the web, cyber space – they're remarkable tools for work and pleasure. But Pandora's box has been opened. It can never be closed. If a fourteen year old boy can cause the chain of events depicted in this play without leaving his bedroom, then the world is a much scarier place than it has ever been before.
2. Oliver Farriumund for FestMag
Based on real events in Greater Manchester in 2003, I Love You Bro is a dark, disquieting tale of sexual fixation and the enormous power of the internet as a tool of deception. The story was originally brought to light in a Vanity Fair article, and this year's Fringe adaptation represents only a small part of the true events which astonished police officers and judges.
Told in panted monologue and with an omnipresent grin, the talented Ash Flanders delivers a script couched in chat-room neologisms with a morbid vigour that suggests bigger things to come for the young actor. A projected pastel backdrop that shifts as the tale unfolds does much to effectively conjure the malleable online world that Johnny inhabits. The portentous air of foreboding is intensified by frequent allusions to Romeo and Juliet , with snapshots of a hellish domestic life permitting glimpses of a human dimension to the protagonist's warped mind. The brief moments of tittered relief are, more truthfully, valves for nervous tension as the play becomes increasingly macabre and Johnny's deceit plumbs new depths of manipulation and sadism.
As the narrative unfolds and Johnny begins to flirt with a psychosis beyond erotic obsession, fictive personas are killed off and his victim becomes embroiled in a finale so horribly ruinous that the audience leaves the theatre stupefied and mute. A fervent production from the deservedly lauded Three To A Room theatre company, this is powerful, gripping theatre at its best.
3. Beth Friends for What's On Stage
Adam J. A. Cass' sinister tale exposes the dangerous and immersive world of internet communication. Told by fourteen year old Johnny, a calculating chat rooms addict, I Love You, Bro bravely explores the corrupting force of unrequited love and artful manipulation.
Johnny is a webpage parasite. Life outside the web for him is worthless, disappointing and cruel. One night Johnny, posing as a girl online named Alba J, entices chat room virgin named Marky Mark into an explicit conversation. Johnny describes how he then experienced the thunderbolt, the Romeo & Juliet moment. Spellbound by Mark's good nature and athletic looks Johnny's monologue begins here and builds to the climax six months from this point. Over this time Johnny weaves Mark into a crawling mess of lies all designed to ignite reciprocated love from Mark. The story takes off from there. Cass stretches a simple idea into an engaging and frightening thriller. New characters, born from Johnny's imagination enter the boys' digital world: a serial killer, a female secret service agent and multiple family members of Alba J. The play's climax is electric. Johnny, lovesick and haunted by his own creations, orders Mark to kill him to prove his devotion to the secret service.
Direction from Yvonne Virsik and a stunning performance from Ash Flanders combine with the riveting story to produce an original Fringe hit. Flanders plays with his audience. Our immediate impression of Johnny as a slimy puppet master disintegrates into a lost and lonely boy deserving of our sympathy.
Nick Wollan's delicate piano score sets the tone perfectly whilst Alexandra Aldrich's lighting design floods the stage with sickly gangrene shades capturing the diseased, desolate world Johnny inhabits. The set design is occasionally effective but the projections are not used enough through Flanders' speech.
Overall a thoroughly enjoyable thought-provoking piece exploring a shadowed potentially destructive world we should explore and question.
4. Geoff for One 4 Review
I must admit that I have never been on any of the networking sites such as Facebook, Myspace or Bebo and I am not up on the all the stuff that occurs on these or any chat room for that matter, so perhaps I was not the best reviewer to see this play written by Adam Cass. However go I did and although a little of the in language and terms washed over me what I did see was a very good if somewhat disturbing performance by Ash Flanders.
The soliloquy is the true story of a 14 year old boy and his ability to manipulate situations, culminating in serious consequences simply because he could.
He creates a web of fictitious characters to achieve his aims as crazy as they may be. This gripping performance has Mr Flanders playing all of his fictitious characters; making then as believable to the audience as to his victim, and the stark set, with occasional back projected slides were the only aid to this talented young man.
It certainly opened my eyes to this practice and I applaud the company for staging it.
5. John Bailey for RealTime Arts
Here's a curious counter-example: Three to a Room's upcoming Edinburgh tour of Adam JA Cass' I Love You, Bro. It's a genuinely stunning monologue in itself, earning acclaim for playwright Cass and performer Ash Flanders when staged in last year's Melbourne Fringe Festival. It traces the true story of a 14-year-old English boy whose obsessive search for human interaction through online chatrooms led to his stabbing in a dank alley, a police investigation unveiling a vast web of lies and intricate role-play, and a court conviction for inciting his own murder. There is an “I” in alienation, apparently.
A thrilling story aside, what makes this tour so interesting is in the way that Three to a Room—a company of three young theatremakers—have taken this small production, along with Sisters Grimm's equally fringe cult schlock-fest Mommie and the Minister, and pushed them all the way to the Edinburgh Fringe. It's not that they're adapting these works. They're doing something oddly rare in the independent theatre scene—producing. Having already toured their own productions to Edinburgh—the lauded An Air Balloon Across Antarctica—the company this time round has found a pair of pre-existing pieces which deserve further life, and has taken on the job of making the connections between these satellite performances and the solid terrain of Scotland. The business of the independent producer—the forging ties between free-floating creatives and established institutions—has been one of the more exciting areas of development and discussion in recent years, and the work of small companies such as Three to a Room add an extra layer of activity to the trend.6. DM for Fringe Review
Low Down
Adelaide based theatre collective Three in a Room present a tale of teenage web chat deception and manipulation, based on a shocking true story.
Review
Wow. Strap yourself in for this one. It's a white knuckle ride into the (true) dark side of teenage web chat fantasy, played with terrific, feral intensity by the alarmingly talented Ash Flanders. This dark, claustrophobic and almost unbearably tense hour is written by Adam Cass. It started life as a film script, based on the true story of a teenage boy from a small town near Manchester in 2003 becoming embroiled in an online love affair, which ended in him manipulating and deceiving the object of his online affection into trying to murder him.
This monologue is a revelation; for those of us old and stupid enough to have never really bothered with the chatroom phenomenon (this reviewer doesn't even belong to facebook), it is a fascinating look at the subculture and terminology of chatrooms, and is a convincing expose of the dangers to be found therein, especially for confused, emotionally disturbed teenagers. The quality of the writing is first class, and driven with a kind of urgent, obsessive vernacular that quickly fleshes out the subject, Johnny, before plunging us headlong into his vortex of online love, and the furious invention of shifting identities and events that he uses to ensnare his unwitting, credulous lover.The audience, too, is manipulated, swung between sympathy for Johnny's desperate love, and disgust at the length s to which he will go to deceive Mark, the football playing golden boy who arouses his passions. The staging is spare, with computer generated backdrops playing over Johnny's face or framing his lithe, awkward body as it twists in the rising agony of his despair, becoming slowly trapped in the arabesques of his plotting and obsession.
A real psychological thriller, Flanders and Cass together create the online characters real and imagined so well that, like Johnny, the audience starts to forget that there is only one person there. A monolgue, yet truly an utterly successful, vital piece of true theatre. Go see.
7. Duska Radosavljevic for The Stage
It was only a matter of time before a piece like this came about – a real-life cyber sex thriller about fabricated identities, burning passions for invisible strangers and the near fatal consequences of infatuation-fuelled exploits.
Johnny (Ash Flanders) Image: Sarah Walker
At the centre of it is a 14-year-old British boy Johnny – a self-confessed "genius" and "confident trickster" – with quite a story to prove it. His invisible co-protagonist and the subject of his growing adoration is Marky Mark – an exemplary student and sports prodigy – with a proneness to gullibility.
The most surprising thing, however, is that this particular show hails from Melbourne – which, in a way, is also a testament to just how far-reaching Johnny's genius really is.
Based on a feature from Vanity Fair, Adam JA Cass's script in Ash Flanders' rendition initially comes across as a mix between Berkoffian Cockney and poetic 'yoofspeak', interspersed with the internet chat-room punctuation.
As the story grows into a captivating web of deceit and despair, we become witness to a shattering account of loneliness which accompanies the sexual awakening of a homosexual young man into a homophobic environment.
Or, in a paraphrase of Johnny's own words – this is a story of a contemporary Juliet – every bit as tragic as the Shakespearean original.
8. JF for ScotsGay
This is the true story of a 14 year old boy who discovers his sexuality in an internet chat-room. As he indulges in on-line chat with one of his town's footie players, he finds himself mistaken for a female and makes the decision not to correct the mistake. The relationship escalates to one-sided cyber cam sex, and before Johnny knows it he finds himself inextricably drawn into a full-blown and dangerous infatuation.
It's the performance by Ash Flanders which brings this show to the heights of greatness. I can't imagine any other actor who would play the part of Johnny better than Flanders, who adopts the increasingly unhinged persona perfectly. His performance is convincing, emotive and sparklingly brilliant as he transports the audience into Johnny's head as he experiences the full spectrum of emotions this young lad undergoes in the lead-up to the planning of his own death.
9. Greer Ogston for The List
Johnny (Ash Flanders) just wants to be someone, and online he can be anyone he wants. What starts out as a humorous look at socialising in the digital era swiftly morphs into a dark analysis of our atomised society.
After a chance online meeting with the object of his desire, stud footballer ‘Markymark', Johnny heads into a downward spiral of complex lies and multiple characters.
Struggling with his sexuality, he finds release communicating with Markymark by creating a female character, Jess. This leads to a convoluted scenario involving fictitious characters such as little brother Leo, Jane Bond and agent 47695. This escapism is a powerful temptation and Johnny's ability to indulge completely in his constructed reality is, somehow, eerily recognisable.
Yvonne Virsik's production unfolds in front of a computer screen with projections of Johnny's fragmented thoughts on the backdrop. Flanders' representation of this disturbed teen is compelling (although his accent can be distracting). Based on a true story, this is an intense exploration of the dark side of the teen psyche, scattered with sharp humour as the protagonist teaches us online chat abbreviations and we ROFL, or at the very least LOL.
Mommie & the Minister Reviews 1. Matt Boothman for The List
Gerard Anthony has created a monster. The titular Mommie of this Hammer Horror homage is part drag queen, part Methodist preacher, part Bride of Frankenstein. Anthony's range runs from shrill unctuousness through pious browbeating all the way to sinister guttural Satan-zombie. He is the campest, most overblown feature of a play that's clearly aiming to be the campest, most overblown thing at the Fringe.
Mommie keeps her children, Edmund and Harriet Lovely, in the basement. There they have spent 20 years waiting to be judged obedient and respectful enough to meet the mysterious Minister. The inevitable cries of 'Too soon!' – from the same people who hoover up exposé after exposé on Josef Fritzl's secret basement family – are only the beginning of their story. Guilty laughs, shocked gasps and outraged knuckle-biting will follow every deliberately (and exhaustingly) overacted exclamation.
From the twins' obscene games ('Find the Bean') to the predictably gory dénouement, every aspect of the play is shamelessly calculated to shock and offend. Like its source material, the show is unafraid to be what it is: a barefaced challenge to the kind of society that bans ice-cream van chimes for being too loud, or writes stiff letters to newspapers about shows like this.
2. Thom Dibdin for The Stage Edinburgh
Declan Greene and Ash Flanders have created a nightmare vision of childhood for Sisters Grimm, which is dark, disturbing and utterly bizarre.
Twins Edmund (Flanders) and Harriet (Gillian Perry) have been incarcerated in a cellar for the last 20 years, but still act as if they were six years old. Every day, their beloved Mommie (Gerard Williams) visits to reward them with slops, promising that they can return upstairs to visit the Minister when he is ready to see them.
This would simply be hilarious fun if the memory of Josef Fritzl were not so fresh in the memory. With those overtones, however, their is a poignancy and a sharp edge of malevolence to the production.
Flanders and Perry create a complex, tight-knit duo in the twins. Although their world is clearly slipping from them and each has their own sneering disregard for the other, they are completely dependent. And while they ritualise their play and relationships in this hellhole cellar, you are convinced of the upstairs world.
It is Williams (drag queen Missfit) as grotesque Mommie which brings back the comedy. As the twins begin to take power, references to big, melodramatic black and white B-movies begin to creep in and the ending spins well out of control in the bad taste stakes. Top drawer trash.
3. Jo Bedford for FestMag
There's nothing subtle about Mommie and the Minister . From drag queens, through incest and child abuse, to melodramatic spurts of fake blood, this is a gothic pantomime with all the darkness of a psychological thriller and the political correctness of an episode of Brass Eye .
This Sisters Grimm cult smash hit tells the story of a brother and sister: Edmund and Harriet have been imprisoned in a basement for twenty years by their Cruella DeVil lookalike "mommie," who passes her days entertaining a mysterious minister. Fed on nothing but newspaper mush, these adult-children attempt to uncover the dark truth about "mommie and the minister" before it's too late.
The cast of three, with the help of some flashing lights and haunting sound effects, maintain the tension with gutsy, energetic performances that never waver. Particularly alarming is the larger than life, mascara drenched Mommie, who looms menacingly over the stage as she taunts her children. Thanks to the flimsy plot which leaves a few loose threads hanging—who after all is the minister?—and the handful of especially crude attempts to shock, cries of “suck my cock” being one, the melodrama however manages to be more disturbing than comic.
The phrase "in poor taste" springs to mind when describing a show that points a satirical finger at issues of child abduction and abuse, but this, it seems, is the point. This production deliberately laughs in the face of taboo in a bid to both shock and entertain and the result is a surprisingly unsettling, but not necessarily funny, theatrical experience.
