Who was alive in the 90s? asks Clare. The hands go up. Everyone! What do we remember? How about Britpop? Blur versus Oasis. Nick Cave. Kylie. And – with I-told-you-so shock and excitement – Nick AND Kylie. Together! See, I told you she was cool, I knew it all along, says Terry (whose teenage self talks to Kylie every night in his bedroom). Tony Blair and the 1997 election – everyone, but everyone, is going to vote Labour! Raves. Trance. Dance. Drugs. Hip hop. Underworld. The Fugees. The Spice Girls – love em or hate em.  TOOT –Terry O’Donovan, Stuart Barter and Clare Dunn – were teenagers in the 1990s, hence their intense interest in this particular decade.

The trio are named after their first show (Ten Out Of Ten), and what looked to be a kind of friendly one-off seems to have turned into an ongoing venture. Both of the company’s shows pride themselves on their special relationship with audience, who are embroiled into the action in a gentle and unthreatening way. Whilst TOOT (the show) brought us back to the schoolroom to investigate success and failure, their second show, Be Here Now, explores the importance of pop music in our nation’s coming-of-age stories – and specifically the importance of 1990s pop music in the personal stories of the three TOOT performers. It is (inevitably) a show steeped in nostalgia – but there is always a lively and engaging tug between past and present. The balance between the universal and the individual is held well.

So how does it all play out? The audience are seated on three sides (with a great bank of cardboard storage boxes forming the back wall). The boxes are opened to reveal the contents of a 90s teenage bedroom: glitter lava lamps, portable cassette players, a portrait of Kylie, a shower of Massive Attack Blue Lines CDs, a clutter of mini-discs – including the one that Marcus (age 17) made for Clare when she was just 15. The stories unfurl in many wondrous ways. Clare and Marcus! She can hardly believe it; she never thought he’d even noticed her (especially as she was wearing that horrible jumper that she wouldn’t have wanted to be caught dead in). Stuart-as-Marcus – transformed into a cool 90s teenager with the ruffling of his hair, and the donning of a baggy jumper and slouchy walk – reads out the tracklisting on the minidisk, and Clare responds with an astute physical playing out of the emotional register of each track – walking assertively, dancing wildly, posing, relaxing as the tunes merge and mingle – 2 Become 1, Killing Me Softly – the ultimate liberated 90s girl, the world at her feet. Meanwhile Terry’s stuck in a bit of a dilemma – spinning the bottle and being pushed forward to ask for a kiss by the male friend who’s the object of his nascent gay desire, rather than the girl he’s got to kiss. All three performers are excellent, their interactions perfectly tuned. The relationship with audience is paramount – we are talked to, played with, sung to, and (in one wonderful scene) invited up to become extras in Stuart’s heartbreaking story of a fantasy encounter gone pear-shaped.

Running through it all is the notion that the 90s was probably the last era when pop music was really, really important to young people. Or maybe everyone thinks that about ‘their’ decade. Was it better then or now, the TOOT team wonder. Certainly it was the last era in which you had to wait all night for the DJ to play your tune (rather than downloading it immediately onto your phone). The last era when you desperately coveted that new single by your favourite artist, saving up your pocket money and going out to buy it on a Saturday afternoon. The last era when music was relayed on actual physical artefacts – vinyl, CDs, cassettes, mini-discs – before the download era: by the beginning of the next decade, your mate could come round to your house and swipe your whole lovingly-amassed music collection onto an iPod in minutes. How has the culture of instant gratification changed us, wonder the TOOTs. This lost world of desire and longing reassembles itself deftly before our eyes (and ears).

This is not the only interactive contemporary theatre show about our relationship to pop music: Be Here Now is preceded by Periplum’s 45 Revolutions Per Moment and Uninvited Guests’ Love Letters Straight From Your Heart, and there are (intentionally or unintentionally) echoes of both shows. But Be Here Now is no bootleg copy. It is its own unique self, with brilliant and engaging performances from the TOOT trio. All are strong physically-rooted performers – all three sing, dance, DJ, all the time telling stories of first romantic fumbles, crushes, sexual fantasies, growing awareness of being gay, romantic disappointment, serious courtship, and marriage (we are invited to film the wedding on our phones). Stuart Barter – better known as a musician – really shines as a physical actor in this TOOT show: the way in which he gently leads the whole room into a great big rave-up (we are brought in as extras of the story of How Stuart Met Julie) is truly magical. At the beginning of the show, we are asked to write down the name of a song (from any era) that reminds us of our first love. The tunes we picked at the beginning are later delivered to us in a number of enchanting ways – although if there is one small dramaturgical quibble it is that suddenly moving out of the 90s world to incorporate the choices of audience members of tunes from other eras into the show feels a little odd. Perhaps the TOOT team need to decide if they might be better sticking to their lovingly created 1990s world, rather than breaking it with musical intrusions from other eras. This aspect of the show, lovely though it is, is also the one that ties it most closely to the two other shows about pop music referenced above.

But that aside, Be Here Now is really and truly a lovely show – heartwarming, engaging, and entertaining. A hit, pop-pickers!