Theatre: Not Me… (★★★)

Gap II
Devised and directed by Hermione Gehle
Set design by Jamie Davies
Music by Tim Newhouse
Lighting and sound by Desne Smallberger
Devised and performed by Ashana Murphy, Adam Droppert, Angela Mahlatjie, Emma Harvey, Jordan Holloway, Justin Gray, Nicholas Allen, Quaid Kirshner, and Danen Englenberg
Subiaco Arts Centre Studio
March 26-28, then in schools

Theatre-in-education is a tricky business. You’re either putting established work in front of an understandably wary audience, or the lives of school-aged students on stage for people that know those lives – their own lives – much better than you do.
Not Me… is an example of the latter, and, happily, it makes a more than decent fist of it.
The story of a cohort of high school kids, mostly years 11 and 12, a couple a year or two younger, whose lives and relationships are dominated, then upturned, by social media, has been fashioned by the director Hermione Gehle and a cast of nine students at The Actor’s Hub’s Gap II course into a tightly-realised cautionary tale that I’m confident will pass the cringe test of high school audiences.