I Love You, Bro
I Love You, Bro
Three To A Room
Carlton Courthouse
21 July 2008
Award-winning one-man play I Love You, Bro tells the story of 14-year-old Johnny, creator of hundreds of different characters on the Internet, and star in a story that ultimately culminated in the organisation of his own murder. Written by Melbourne playwright Adam J. A. Cass based on a true story, the play explores what it really means to be ‘a real person’ in a world where the only evidence of a person’s existence may be words on a screen.
Told mainly through Johnny’s chat room talks with ‘MarkyMark,’ a football star who Johnny becomes infatuated and ultimately obsessed with, the story is rapid-fire, told in a steady stream of monologue. Covering more than five months of time, the story is beautifully well-crafted as it hurtles towards its inevitable close.
Ash Flanders is electric as Johnny, switching between his characters without any pause or break in the flow. Over the course of the hour’s performance, he is called upon to play every role in the story, from his mother to each of his characters, and the switch between them is absolute enough to be practically tangible.
Ash’s natural energy suited the character well, with tics and nervous habits personalising Johnny – a difficult task for a character so far removed from common experience. By humanising his character, Ash introduces an element of humour and sadness that engage the audience absolutely.
Performed as it was in a thick cockney accent, the character’s voice was unfamiliar and difficult to decipher at first for my Australian ears, but familiarity with Johnny’s speech patterns made all the difference as the show went on. The words fit the accent well, and it is difficult to imagine the character in any other voice, particularly considering the English location of the story.
Simple staging and extensive use of computer projection served well to locate the action in front of a computer screen. The opening scene, when Johnny sits down and is lit purely by the projected blue glow, is fantastically evil, sending shivers down my spine.
With a powerhouse script and fantastic performance, I Love You, Bro is an unsettling, unnerving, incredible piece of theatre, made only more strange by the truth of the tale that it is based on.
I Love You, Bro leaves Australian shores on Wednesday for a season in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.