This collaboration between Mancunian writer, director, and performer Chris Thorpe and poet and performer Hannah Jane Walker follows up their nationally touring hit The Oh F-ck Moment (2011/12), and once again casts identifiable experience through verbal and theatrical dexterity to re-mould our perspective on everyday life. The impossibility of loneliness, when contact is only ever a thumb press away, and the resultant shifts in our experience of intimacy is the show’s heartfelt thesis. But it’s much more fun than the psychology essay it could have been instead!

We are all invited to leave our phones on. The pair create a warm atmosphere which can just about contain the anxiety triggered by the possibility of having to answer it in front of a room of 30 people. The presence of the handsets – in our pockets, on the floor, thrumming with potential – is almost a smoking gun. It binds us together as the willing lab rats in this experiment.

As we sit in clusters, in pairs, in a circle, Thorpe and Walker gradually deconstruct the weird filter to experience that mobile technology has evolved. The writing blends conversational direct address with gentle philosophical questionings, always ready to reach for the sucker punch example in comic or tragic form. More phrased, ‘poetic’ sequences lend gravity to the plight described. Is this our contemporary tragedy: condemned to proximity without closeness, more alone than ever, even as we over-share? Of course this is an old argument, the fear of technology as master rather than servant of our desires. And while the medium is never less than compelling, the message didn’t always convince.

In this deceptively simple, sincere show, there’s a sense of having mined the theatrical possibilities of working with this idea, creating a wealth of material, connected but not always relating. When we interact by phone message does it demonstrate alienation or intimacy, as we catapult ourselves into a stranger’s palm? As our Chinese whispers spread round the circle, the unusual thrill of an immediate connection feels just as much in evidence as the distortion that occurs when messages are shared. But at its heart this show is a plea for connection – that most theatrical of notions – and even in a noisy back room in BAC it succeeds in truly drawing us together and acknowledging one another in a way that feels rare and compelling. Its lovingly crafted stories, examples, and observations remind us that despite the convenience and prevalence of this technology we have a choice of model. And in my book, a little bit of resistance can never be a bad thing.