Sue Gough, The Courier-Mail

A web of modern madness.

Technologists have a nice euphemism for the misuse of their creations. They call it "function creep". Just how far this misuse can go may be beyond their limited scientific imaginations, but Australian playwright Adam Cass demonstrates the very real, very toxic possibilities.

He has adapted a true case-history that unfolded a few years ago in England, where a nine-month chatroom relationship led to 16-year-old and 14-year-old boys being charged, one with attempted murder and the other, bizarrely, with inciting his own murder. It was a long and twisted tale and a police analyst calculated that if converted into paper, the data would stretch more than 14 km.

The voice and syntax invented by the playwright waver in a no-man's land that is neither English nor Australian, and at times even takes on a Shakespearean tone to remind us that this is a tragedy in the tradition of Romeo and Juliet. While this approach does not always let the words flow easily as they might, there is no doubt that Cass weaves a faultlessly complex narrative, and David Berthold's direction results in a production of dark enchantment.

Renee Mulder's bent set geometric set and Carolyn Emerson's lighting and enhance, yet never intrude upon, the main focus of the central character.

During a 90-minute monologue by 14-year old Johnny, the audience is seduced into collusion with his murky world of deception, where an ever-more elaborate structure of lies teeters like a house of cards.

The play is a marathon for and actor. Leon Cain never falters, channelling Johnny and an increasing number of alter egos with an engaging innocent charm.
Not only does the character have a precocity and intelligence far ahead of his emotional and sexual development, he also has a disturbing imagination capable of erasing the line between reality and fiction.

While his violent stepfather prowls outside his door, he meets a young local footballer online and imagines him into a heroic champion and lover. Desperate to escape into a better world, he constructs a female cyber personality and begins an online love affair with this Markymark.

The success of his deceptions leads him to take his scenarios to dangerously unbelievable lengths. It's as if desperately wants his "mark" to see the truth.

However, to his amazement, he continues to be believed and the power gives him the buzz of an addictive drug.

We watch as Johnny becomes trapped in his own elaborate creations.

On one level, they take him over with the force of demonic possession. On another, he remains aware of the game he is playing and despises not only his own lies, but also the gullibility of Markymark.

As neither the physical world nor the cyber world can continue to sustain him, he begins to look for a final release.

This is edge-of-your-seat theatre that demands your total concentration in order to steer your own way through these parallel worlds.

Bree Hadley, The Australian

ADAM Cass's I Love You, Bro is an engaging portrayal of just how far some young people can go in constructing fantasy worlds online.

The play is, according to Cass, based on the case of two teenage boys in Britain in the early 2000s.

Troubled teen Johnny lives at home with his mother and her new partner. Lurking in an online chat room one day, he strikes up a conversation with MarkyMark, a slightly older soccer-playing boy from the popular crowd in his own local town, who mistakes him for a girl.

The plot unfolds from this one moment of mistaken identity.

Johnny concocts an increasingly tenuous series of characters, plot twists and intrigues to try to maintain his relationship with MarkyMark and deal with the lie at the heart of his first love, eventually conspiring - as he tells us from the first moment - to cause his own murder.

The strength of Cass's I Love You, Bro is in the energy, pace and wit with which he imbues the dialogue of this one-man show. Moving rapidly from one bizarre moment in Johnny's tale to the next, the play captures something of the tenor of teenage impulsiveness, split-second decision-making and insatiable desire it must take to keep building and believing in this sort of shared fantasy.

In this production for La Boite Theatre Company, director David Berthold places Johnny in a stark world, the real contours of his bedroom delineated only by angles, lines and words in a compact set designed by Renee Mulder. Leon Cain, as Johnny, handles the storytelling, character shifts and humour of Cass's script well. Cain's transitions between Johnny, his family in the offline world, and the many characters he creates online is sharp, and he delivers the whole piece with an almost tongue-in-cheek knowingness that suits it well.

While it is sometimes hard to fathom the level of guile and gullibility on which Johnny's fantasy world depends, and there's a sense in which the precise mode of online interaction embodied in I Love You, Bro is stuck in a world before Web 2.0 fully took hold, it is undoubtedly entertaining.

Katherine Lyall-Watson, ourbrisbane.com

What is it with Leon Cain and opening night injuries? A couple of years ago Leon twisted (or did he break?) his ankle on opening night of The Wishing Well at La Boite. He bravely kept going and hobbled his way through the rest of the performance but was in plaster for the rest of the season.

Leon's back centre stage at La Boite, this time in a one-man show: I Love You, Bro. As if being the solo performer isn't enough stress, on Sunday (four days before opening) he twisted the same ankle. Tuesday's preview saw him with two crutches, Wednesday's preview he was down to one crutch and on opening night he managed the performance without any crutches. Whoo!

Not only did Leon manage the performance - he excelled in it. I Love You, Bro is a one-man tour de force. He plays 12 characters (I can recall 9 of them but I'm happy to trust Leon's count!) and manages to make each of them distinct and easily recognisable.

Adam JA Cass has done a great job with this script. The subject matter sounds terribly heavy - the true story of a 14-year-old boy who incites his own murder via invented chatroom characters - but in fact it is hilarious and incredibly touching. The writing is fast, witty and a huge challenge for any actor.

David Berthold has directed this piece extremely well. We get right inside Johnny's head and what could be a static monologue becomes instead a vibrant piece with enough movement to keep it dynamic but not so much that it detracts from the inward looking soliloquy.

The only distraction for me was the lack of accent used in the production, when the script is written with an emphasis on a working class British accent. But my ear soon got used to the anomaly and stopped taking notice of it.

Renee Mulder's design suits the play well - the set is a floating parallelogram, folded in the middle so that it becomes a backdrop as well as a floor. The clean cut lines and sparseness made me think of computers and information flowing through the aether. At the front of the stage there's an area where the set becomes a cockpit for this kamikaze pilot to steer his vehicle to oblivion. This is his desk, or perhaps it's an outline of his computer, and it's the place he keeps returning to as he spins his online webs of deceit.

Carolyn Emerson's lighting highlights perfectly the moments where Johnny is in public chatrooms and the second he hits the button to move to a private space. Along with Jaxzyn's visual design, playing out on the floor and wall behind Leon, and Guy Webster's sound design, all elements of this production keep the play and the actor central while enhancing the mood of the piece.

You wouldn't believe this story was possible if you didn't know it was based on truth. The idea that a young boy could dream up all these characters and create such a compelling drama to ensnare his friend isn't as preposterous as it seems. There are many precocious children around. What's more startling is the parents who didn't notice or didn't care when their child retreated to his room and took up online chatting around the clock. (Playwright Cass explains this well - so that we can appreciate why Johnny's mother is incapable of supervising or protecting her son.)

As for Marky Mark, the gormless, gullible friend, he seems hopelessly naïve and trusting until you think of actual 16 year olds and how emotionally immature many of them are. His crime was credulity and vanity.

I Love You, Bro is a fabulous play. Beautifully written, directed and designed and with a mesmerising performance at its heart.
For more information on the true story of Johnny and Marky Mark, read the Vanity Fair article that inspired the play.

I Love You, Bro plays at the Roundhouse Theatre until 8 August, 2010.

Kate Foy, Greenroom

I've often found myself using the caveat about something outrageous from real life … mostly behaviour … you know how it goes, 'If they put that on stage, no one would believe it!' Well, someone did. Adam J Cass, in fact. The writer of I Love You Bro' La Boite's latest, directed by David Berthold takes the real-life extraordinary circumstances of a 14 year old from Manchester in the UK who conspired to kill himself. He and his dupe, an online chat friend 'MarkyMark' were eventually arrested and charged with attempted murder and incitement to murder. Yes indeed, an unbelievable (almost) real story and another in the 'troubled teen' genre, one that's absurd, tragic and hints at that bogeyman of the 'dangerous web.' I thought in passing as I left the building after the performance that La Boite could quite easily have sub-titled their 2010 season as 'People behaving crazily at full stretch.' It's been one of those years so far.

I Love You Bro' is also one of the saddest plays I've seen in a long time. The boy is a victim of domestic violence and he retreats upstairs to his room away from the horrors of his mother's abusive relationship with his step-father. Loveless and powerless in the real world, he finds escape, solace and strength in the anonymity of a web chat-room. The virtual guise of 'Johnny Boy' is also a mask to hide behind and protect himself from the real world downstairs. You've probably heard of the way domestic violence can breed itself and replicate in children damaged this way? Johnny's new powerful virtual self recreates a world of violence in an online chatroom, creating personas and a plot-line that abuses trust, relationships, kills off characters with abandon, and finally sets his own head and life spinning out of control.

The tangled webs of the play are beautifully drawn, paced and directed by Berthold and his team of design creatives (Renée Mulder, Carolyn Emerson, Guy Webster and Jaxzyn). They provide an open platform (which is not without its acoustic challenges for an actor) and create a world of light and sound that cleverly punctuates and paces narrative and action. The night probably belongs to Leon Cain as 'Johnny-Boy' who never flags during the 75 minutes he holds the stage alone. A measure, I think, of a good performance is when an actor takes you by surprise, wrong-foots your expectations and delights you with the unexpected.

Cain's usual onstage persona - an easy boyish charm - gets a makeover in what is a break-through role for him. He plays a kid, but this is a grown-up actor at work.

The role offers the actor a chance to show his acting stamina, his stagecraft and mastery over a complex and and nicely poetic text; the results in Leon Cain's interpretation are accomplished. Along the way he transcends the character's geeky goofiness and segues effortlessly into a frightened and vulnerable kid, one who is also terrifyingly dangerous.

And a measure of a good playtext in production? Leaving aside production values for a minute, it's one that takes you by surprise and delight, mixes up your thinking, leaves you pondering. My allegiances swung wildly during the course of the play - by turns I wanted to slap Johnny-Boy, cheer him on (something about geeks vs sports-jocks - you'll know what I mean if you see the play) and just hug him. I really liked the feel and especially the sound of Cass' text in performance; it exploits its own theatricality without ever losing the audience's engagement in the reality of its central character. The real-life Johnny-Boy failed to get himself killed all those years ago and lives now, perhaps with regret, but certainly in Cass' take on what was headline stuff at the time, a certain swaggering infamy to tell the tale. 'I'm something now,' he tells us as the lights fade.

On opening night La Boite asked audience members to tweet their reviews of what they'd just seen. These were immediately projected on to the large screen in the Parade Ground Yard for the after-show reception. Within minutes the screen lit up with complimentary 140 character comments. If you'd like to see what was said, you can do so by searching on Twitter using the hashtag for the event: #laboite

Samantha Fordham, M/C Reviews

David Berthold's latest production for La Boite, of a play by Adam J A Cass, presents a world characterised by delusion, MSN chatrooms, fake spies, and vanity. It is here we are introduced to 14-year-old Johnny and the complex world he has woven in order to continue contact with his first 'real' love, footie player Mark. This sinister tale of deceit is based upon true events that took place in Manchester, England, in 2003. It was a case that saw a startling legal precedent form-the charging of a 14-year-old boy for inciting his own murder and his 16-year-old best friend for attempted murder.

This one-man show takes place upon a simple Microsoft-blue set and revolves around the strange world created by our protagonist, the deluded Johnny. It starts innocently enough, when Johnny is mistakenly taken for a girl in an MSN chatroom by Markymark, the footie player. Of course, that first fatal decision - not to correct Mark about his real identity - is what sets Johnny on his course of obsession and fantasy in which the only thing that really matters is getting Markymark to dance for him one more time.

Johnny inhabits a world, on stage, that exists only in internet chat rooms. Leon Cain, as Johnny, masterfully performs all Johnny's characters as their exploits play out in Johnny's mind. Cain is engaging and does a wonderful job of presenting the complex narrative of fantasy and reality-a world that will ultimately destroy him. Despite the sinister undertone of Johnny's delusion there is much humour in this production. It's the sort of humour that comes from disbelief that anyone, really, could ever convince themselves it is OK to create such a devastating web of deceit. It turns out that even Johnny himself could no longer tolerate his own contrivances and conspires, as a fake secret service agent, with the gullible Mark, to set up his own murder.

This gullibility finally becomes too much for both Johnny and us as audience. I felt a frustration with Markymark which was eventually echoed by Cain in the final moments of the play. I also found myself dissatisfied, initially, with Cain's accent. The script seemed to present a north England dialect, but this is noticeably missing. As the production gets under full steam, though, this oversight is easily forgotten - Cain's onstage energy is compensation enough and we are soon immersed in the crazy world of Johnny. Cass's script is fabulously well-written - this is a dark and difficult subject, but he has triumphed in presenting a poignant and very human look at the complex world of a deluded and obsessed teenager.

Carolyn Emerson's Microsoft-blue light projection, which changed a little tone-wise each time Cain began a new section (sort of like when you move your mouse and the colour reignites after the screen starts to go to sleep) appears to situate the action as taking place within the computer itself. This is an effective strategy for narrative based upon a boy whose friendships and sense of reality exists only within the world of MSN chat rooms.

I was living in the UK when the true events this production is based upon took place and I think they captured the imagination of many, troubled at the thought of a generation of teenagers who spend so much time within the cyber-reality of faceless chat rooms or social networking sites. Johnny behaved this way because he could and, ultimately, he paid a heavy price - in part his own sanity. The way in which this production questions the nature of reality and relationships is partly what makes it so engaging to watch. The explicit allusions to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet ask us to consider the way in which story and narrative inhabit our lives on a daily basis. For Johnny, though, he didn't take things only one step too far, he had sprinted so far beyond the pale that return would have seemed an impossible option.

This production is an entertaining journey through ideas of storytelling, deceit, and vanity. Despite the incredible gullibility of Markymark and Johnny's almost unbelievable talent for manipulation and lies, this tale still manages to be touching and incredibly engaging as Cain expertly moves between multiple, but distinct characters. I can't recommend this production enough, it is funny and insightful with a truly great performance from Leon Cain.

Nigel Munro-Wallis, 612 ABC

This very good and rather disturbing one-man play showcases the talent of star Leon Cain.

In a world where the internet is so all pervasive it is perhaps hard for some of us who are middle aged or older to grasp just how integral this communication medium is to the lives of young people. I Love You, Bro therefore serves as something of a heads up on what our kids might be up to when they spend endless hours alone in their bedrooms chatting on the net.

Granted, we have all heard (and heeded, I hope) the warnings about the dangers of pedophiles posing as young people and luring innocent young people to clandestine meetings, but what of the genuine conversations that go on between teenagers themselves? What do they talk about? Who are they talking to? How do they present themselves?

Such is the premise at the root of this disturbing play by Melbourne playwright Adam Cass. And I say disturbing because this story has its basis in fact - the fact that a fourteen-year-old boy was able to weave such an intricate web of lies and deceit that he has another teenager actually believing that all the characters he invented are real (even though he hadn't actually physically met any of them) and that such a web of lies ended in attempted murder.

At the centre of this twisted tale is a lonely boy known as Johnny who strikes up a relationship with another boy MarkyMark. Johnny poses as a girl and strings MarkyMark along through a series of incredible twists and turns that have you wondering how anyone could have believed what was being played out. Johnny wants to be loved - and he is willing to go to any length to keep the object of his love. He is part poet, liar, story teller, actor and conman. He becomes so involved in his own fictional world that he finds himself having to tell more and bigger lies to keep his contact with MarkyMark going and then, quite unbelievably, he incites his own murder in an effort to create some sort of 'romantic' end to the tale.

This is, as you have gathered, a very complex story that has to be seen to be understood. The well written script takes its audience through nine months of the relationship between these two boys in a short eighty minute one-act play that has you gasping at the audacity of it all and keeps you on the edge of your seat right through to the end.

I Love You, Bro is a one-man play, and one-man plays are notoriously difficult to pull off. But Leon Cain acquits himself well and hardly falters, though one of my nagging problems with his performance is that it becomes quite difficult at times to see this talented young actor as a fourteen-year-old boy. Granted he is very young looking, but there is still a worldly wise air about him that makes the role sit a little less than comfortably on him at times.

My other issue is Cain's attempt to come to grips with the Northern English accent and vernacular demanded by the script. It leaves you wondering why the playwright found it necessary to attempt this device in the first place. Surely the point of the piece is that it takes place in cyberspace and cyberspace is everywhere and nowhere!

But be that as it may, perhaps I have rather over emphasised the difficulties and problems of what really is a very good and rather disturbing piece of theatre. Leon Cain gives us his best and there are still few, if any, actors that I can call to mind that could have done a better job.

David Berthold as Director shows Brisbane audiences yet again what an exciting and innovative breath of fresh air he has brought to La Boite and that his declared course of bringing the company to national prominence with work that is nationally and internationally relevant is well on course.

Not withstanding my comments above, I Love You, Bro is well worth the price of a ticket. It is socially relevant, well performed and directed and should be compulsory viewing for anyone over the age of fourteen.

See it. Take your teenagers. Talk about it. This is what theatre is about!

Alison Cotes, A Little Gossip

Be afraid, be very afraid. Because this play is not a figment of some nerdy teenager's overwrought imagination, but based on a true story that happened in Manchester seven years ago. It terrified me, as I'm sure it did all the older people in the audience, and my greatest horror was the way in which the younger ones laughed like drains and found it incredibly funny.

I know I'm becoming a Boring Old Fart, especially about the way in which technology is changing the way we think, interact and behave, but this play confirms all the fears that parents, teachers and even BOFs have about the dangers inherent in the Internet and its various chat rooms, Facebook encounters and Twitters. I don't know whether, in the great moral scheme of things, murder is worse than paedophilia, but this story about a chat room junkie who conspires to have himself murdered by a boy whom he meets on line chilled me to the bone, because not only could it happen, it actually did.

The plot is almost too surreal to be true. Lonely nerd Johnny by chance comes across a gullible young football hero, a chat room virgin called MarkyMark. Johnny decides to play games with him and logs in on-line as a girl called AlbaJay. They develop an intimate relationship and MarkyMark wants to meet her, which puts Johnny in something of a dilemma. Is he to reveal the truth, or does he string MarkyMark along a little further and keep finding reasons for his AlbaJay persona not to meet him in real life? He goes for the latter, of course, and that's where the trouble begins, as Johnny has to invent more and more personae and an elaborate plot which includes serial killings, the secret service and a whole family with a murky present. And after that it gets nasty, and I won't spoil it for you by telling you how the whole devastating tragedy plays out.

The play is astonishing because it it's part of a new cyber-genre of theatre, an on-line extended dramatic monologue where we see into the workings of this 14-year-old's mind and begin to understand just how new technology can shape a person's vision of reality.

"Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive," said Walter Scott, but even he could not have predicted the way the Internet has changed society and even human beings' perception of reality. Through his sad lonely protagonist, playwright Adam Cass introduces the audience to a language and way of thinking that may be just a vague perception to most of them, and certainly to me. I certainly knew about Facebook and Twitter etc but, never having used them, was not aware of how insidious their effect could be on impressionable people, especially those with low self-esteem. The script, as far as I could tell, captures perfectly, sometimes to the point of annoyance, the fumbling teenage attempts at communication, and the twisted logic that can go on in the head of a 14-year-old. But it's strangely poetic as well, and Johnny is no inarticulate fool. He justifies his crush as similar to that of Juliet and Romeo, almost the same age as he is, but like all kids he can't see outside the strange context he has devised for himself. Johnny, on a chat room, has created a world and a story he can't control.

Playing a freaked-out teenager at least ten years younger than you is not as easy as it sounds, but Leon Cain is completely in charge, with the fidgety body language as well as the odd not-quite-authentic voices that fourteen-year-old geeks often use. Like, well, ah shit, you know like what I mean, well.

Having a baby face doesn't hurt, either, but it's a bravura performance, for which he deserves full marks for authenticity as well as for sheer endurance - seventy straight minutes alone on stage is not for the faint-hearted. I can see Cain becoming an even more exciting actor after his upcoming stint at the Escola de Clown de Barcelona in Spain, for which he has recently received a Lord Mayor's Fellowship Grant.

You can laugh at this play, but the truths it shares are not funny, and in that sense it hides its own meaning behind a cloak of humour and mockery.

I urge you, especially older people, to see this. You'll begin to understand how teenage minds work in virtual reality, but it will also scare you stupid, and maybe unleash your Inner Fascist, too. And if you're a young person, see this not as a spoof of a lifestyle, but as a Dreadful Warning - this could happen to you. Oh yes, it could!