#follow_me – Contact Theatre, Manchester

Director: Baba Israel

Reviewer: Ruth Lovett

follow me1 Contact Young Actors Company (CYAC) have embarked on a mission to incorporate the 21st Century obsession with social networking in to the traditional world of theatre to highlight how the world may appear to have smaller and better connected but simultaneously more complex and confusing with the lines between friends, acquaintances and relationships becoming blurred and distorted due to the image we create of ourselves online.

The story follows Samuel who moves to the USA and uses various websites such as Twitter and Facebook to communicate with friends, family and girl he really fancies. Samuel and his friends demonstrate how easy it is to project an image of the person you would like to be seen as online and even re-invent yourself if you feel too anonymous which these days is worse than being unpopular.

The story also focuses on Samuel’s grandmother’s introduction to computers and the internet and how we treat computers now as we are so used to having them in our lives. We have become inpatient with them, expect far too much of them perhaps and forget about the human input element of using computers.

Throughout the performance the cast interact with a live Twitter feed and work the tweets in to the performance with varying degrees of success. The graphics and interactive screens and use of video are cleverly done and works with great success. All credit to Gino Evans for working this in to the performance in an effective and tasteful way.

Theatre goers must remember and appreciate that this is a young cast who have been heavily involved in creating this piece and at times, the story does not run as smoothly as it should and at times, the piece is disjointed and difficult to follow. All the strands do not necessarily come together at the end and it sometimes feels as if the piece is moving on without a clear objective in mind.

At times the dialogue is a little rushed and some clearer diction would also help but there are many accomplished performances here and there is potential for this piece to become more successful perhaps with a little more work. follow me

Overall this is an enjoyable hour of theatre which takes the social networking aspect of modern society and shows much of it for what it really is; smoke and mirrors. The cast and production team should be commended for the effort that has gone in to this and be praised for attempting to interact with the audience and take current trends and reference them in a performance.