I Love You, Bro

Company: La Boite
Venue: Roundhouse Theatre, Kelvin Grove, Brisbane
Dates: To 8 August 2010

Leon Cain has once again proved what a talented and sensitive actor he is with a brilliant performance in a play with a plot so weird it has to be true. This, plus David Berthold’s direction and Adam Cass’s words, I Love You, Bro became an unforgettable 70 minutes of gripping theatre.

Cain, after winning the dubbed “best newcomer” in the Matilda awards in 2005 has had more “now he’s made the grade” plays than any other actor I know. That’s probably because he has specialised in young teenage roles and still looks like a teenager on stage when he needs to. Over the past few years he’s won lots of well-earned praise. He was terrific in QTC’s Away in 2006, he won an award for his role as the son in The Wishing Well in 2008 and was praised in That Face last year:. But on the opening night of I Love You Bro he surpassed them all with an amazing solo performance in Adam Cass’s astutely observant work. He played a 14 year-old boy hooked on computer chat rooms in a 70 minute long piece that is based on a real life drama.

Cain plays Johnny who uses an online name of AlbaJay. He is a chat room junkie who makes contact with a boy with the name of MarkyMark, who thinks AlbaJay is a girl. This amuses Johnny who plays the female role, flirts and teases and slowly spins an amazing tale by making up characters as he goes along. He invents AlbaJay as a teenager hottie Jess, a younger step-brother who is actually himself, a villain, a couple of spies and a real younger brother. He spins his soap opera of a story that ends up with his cyber mate stabbing him in a dark ally.

And all this actually happened in 2003 in Manchester in the UK. The real Johnny didn’t die but he was charged with a new crime of inciting his own murder while his 16-year-old friend was charged with attempted murder. Even Agatha Christie couldn’t have invented a plot like that.

So there was Leon, all alone on stage, backed only by some clever lighting, sound and graphics from design trio Renee Mulder, Carolyn Emerson and Jaxzyn. It was an amazing feat of memory for a start; one person shows are hard enough, but to have to create all those other characters and remember who they are and when they are due to talk and use different speaking voices, there was no room for a slip-up or improvisation.

Cain slid from one person to another without even a pause, created his own character so well that we could see into Johnny’s mind and he brought us to understand, even feel we know, MarkyMark as well. Johnny’s chat room mate, we discover is in fact Mark, a 16-year-old football star who Johnny actually had met.

It was just gobsmacking to see it all unfold – it was funny too. Before the show opened I couldn’t see how it would work, chat room keyboard talk doesn’t translate into speech, but Cass had Johnny telling his story, explaining what he was doing, so when the chat was used it was understandable for non geeks. In fact with a few of the more obscure terms were explained to the “oldies” very cleverly with neat humour. It was so simple to understand the workings of Johnny and Mark’s mind.

We chuckled early on when Johnny as AlbaJay conned mark into doing a webcam strip and joined in his gleeful laughter as he spun his insane story of love, abduction, death and resurrection but then Johnny falls in love with Mark, not as Johnny says, in a fag way and the atmosphere changes. He talks him into a meeting. They go to the movies and become mates and Johnny has to keep amending his script. He wants to get rid of all the characters so he can have Mark just for himself.

Poor Johnny slides into the internet trap, he doesn’t eat a or sleep, just sits in front of his computer while his no-hoper mother and her violent boyfriend hover in the background. He grows more and more frantic as he tries to bring his cyber life back to normal. Its gripping stuff and the Roundhouse just erupted as Leon Cain took three deserved curtain calls after the biggest sigh of relief I’ve ever seen from an actor at the end of a show.

It’s great stuff.

Eric Scott

To read more of Eric Scott's theatre reviews, check out Absolute Theatre.