The Tender Age – Version 1.0 and ATYP

Overview

Do you realise there are 17 different flavours of Vodka Cruiser? Raspberry, yes, but beyond that: melon, mulberry, something called 'ice', and diet bitter lemon (still saccharine, we're presuming). It's a specialised area of knowledge that's the preserve of the high-school aged, the drinking noobs, doing it loudly, colourfully, and — as A Current Affair constantly reminds us — badly.

Now you can get reacquainted with this library of alco-pop flavours, and the art of appreciating them, with The Tender Age, which ruminates on that amid a wide range of under-20s knowledge: how to flirt online without scaring someone off, what it feels like to dance past the point your body's spent, what it's like to not be able to escape school bullies in a ubiquitously wired world.

They're tackling the topics that get adults most in a tizz — sex, drugs, and social media — but with docu-theatre virtuosos Version 1.0 (The Table of Knowledge) and the Australian Theatre for Young People devising in collaboration, this is a notably non-hysterical, non-didactic and altogether incisive perspective on the conversation. It's a particularly great one for school groups and cross-generational theatre outings, but it also has a lot of merit as a piece of theatre that anyone negotiating the modern world can relate to.

The prompt for the show was the infamous 2009 incident where a 14-year-old girl revealed she'd been raped while on-air for a gag on the Kyle and Jackie O Show. Transposed to the stage, it's still rawly stomach-turning, though it's not necessarily much connected with or illuminated by the work that unfolds. It's an outlier. Still, the bright, rough-and-tumble young cast (with two pretty cool adults among them) weave some telling scenes. They take the tack that the arrangement of moments of truth builds an argument of itself, and they're right.

Appropriately, The Tender Age also makes some great, responsive use of technology, including from video artist Sean Bacon. It engages the audience and conveys much of the mood of constant social media surveillance.

It's not quite the unbridled anarchy of Ontroerend Goed — there's still the feeling that this is a case of young people responding to an adult's questions rather than necessarily annunciating what concerns them — but The Tender Age clocks up a real achievement by not treating youth like a foreign land. If anything, the message is we're the same across generations. We repeat cycles of behaviour. Adults are just old young people who've had the privilege of not having their mistakes so thoroughly laid down on the public record.