How do you evoke nostalgia for the fairly recent past? At the moment the sound of a dial-up modem does the trick very effectively, which is handy when the play is a revival of Lucy Prebble's first-produced play
The Sugar Syndrome. That sound opening the show clues us in not just to its 2003 setting, but also to what must have been one of the first major plays to look at relationships formed online and, to start with at least, how you might not be getting quite what you were expecting. 17-year-old Dani (Jessica Rhodes) has been using chatrooms to meet people in real life, but some awkward fumbling (how does the props person make stage-jizz anyway, and how do they credit it on their CV?) with the smitten, awkward Lewis (Ali Barouti) turns out not to be exciting enough for her, and her next meeting is more unconventional and potentially dangerous: Pretending to be an 11-year-old boy, she befriends convicted paedophile Tim (John Hollingworth) and arranges to meet him IRL.
