WE LIVE IN a world that would be unrecognisable to anyone of a previous generation. It’s a world where spite and malice can have legs that last forever and a tail that can destroy lives. Indeed, it’s a world where a silly gag can land a child with a sex offenders’ label slapped across his forehead forever. It is a world which has spawned the virtual space of social media platforms, which make mockery of both friendship and privacy, and one which has the internet as its life blood. And it is this type of scenario that playwright Rosalind Butler takes into her brilliant gaze with Expelled, a riveting piece of theatre that should be mandatory for every child (there is a PG 14+ age advisory) who exists in cyber space. It’s on at the Mannie Manim Theatre, Market Theatre complex until 31 March 2024.

It’s not often that a play about the cruelty of children to children, in its writing, direction and performance, can have the power to not slip into moralising platitudes or simplistic lessons. It is in Expelled that we meet the Bolton family. The parents, Lou (Charmaine Weir-Smith) and Rich (Antony Coleman) have busted their proverbials to get their only child, Alex (Nicholas Hattingh) into the best school in the country. It’s a boys’ school with a sterling academic reputation; he’s a boarder. And of course, alongside all the good values of private education, comes the other stuff. The bullying. The boys’ club thinking and, well, teenagers will be teenagers.

Throw an awkward moment involving the principal’s wife’s wig and dressing gown, discovered on a miscreant mission, with sexually violent innuendo and a cell phone, and you get the picture, which reaches everywhere, instantly. The ‘criminals’? Teenaged boys with testosterone flowing from every orifice and a raucous laugh at anything vaguely sexual on their lips all the time. The vehicle? The internet itself. A Trojan Horse that has the power to compromise privacy and inject toxicity and a lack of humour into the most trivial of circumstances.  

But this play is about a lot more than naughty, destructive and rude ideas reaching the wrong eyes, ears and cell phones. It features a gorgeous soliloquy on the mind-numbing juxtapositions and ridiculous imperatives of Facebook, one that would have made Marshall McLuhan, he who trumpeted the medium being the message at the time of the advent of television in the world, smile in his grave. It is a balanced tale about marriage and relationships. And it takes a grown up look at the horror of making a mistake big enough for it to become a label that you carry for the rest of your life. A focus on the ego and its potential to get hooked on Facebook and its affiliates, Expelled is also a red flag and a cipher for the value of whistleblowing in a society that has more or less lost its mooring.

With uniformly fierce and flawless performances by Weir-Smith and Coleman, alongside newcomer Hattingh, the work features a bit of a bland stage that speaks more of corporate furniture than home, but also a clever use of technology which brings the intimate privacy of WhatsApp chats out loud and huge on the walls of the set.  

A tale that will make you laugh out loud, bring you to the edge of tears and leave you deep in thought about the rapidly changing moral environment, on the horns of internet technology that we have helped grow for our children to exist in, this is a must-see, across the ranks of age and society. Go. Now. And take your children.

• Expelled is written by Rosalind Butler and directed by Craig Freimond. Performed by Antony Coleman, Nicholas Hattingh, Graham Hopkins, Amelia Smith and Charmaine Weir-Smith, it is produced by How Now Brown Cow and features production design by Kieran McGregor and Daniel Rutland Manners. It is on stage in the Mannie Manim Theatre, Market Theatre complex in Newtown, Johannesburg, until 31 March 2024.