Playback ★★★★

Playback follows Euan Munro from 2013, when he was a pre-teen, to 2016, when at the age of 14 he had a million YouTube subscribers. Thus unlike most stage performers who take a theatrical look back at their childhoods, Munro has a real advantage: he has substantial video proof.

Those sweet videos are played intermittently alongside the now-adult Munro, who convincingly plays himself at those earlier ages. This combination of live performance and media works strikingly well, making it easy to forget that we’re not watching him in real time, that this is a curated, fast-forward coming-of-age story.

Adorable as Munro is in those early videos, Playback is not interested in soothing the audience in a warm bath of nostalgia. Instead, the show splashes the audience with the cold, hard realities of letting children have legions of unknown followers. For Euan, there are no obvious downsides to being a vlogger; it’s fun to be popular on the internet, to have friends and fans all over the world.

One particularly affable adult, Bill, seems perfectly innocuous at first. He shares a picture of his son who is just a few years younger than Euan to establish trust, and his first messages are benign, even a bit protective. When a random follower asks Euan for a video of himself stroking his feet, Bill steps in quickly to tell him how to handle it.

As Euan’s online chats with Bill extend over a period of time, and as the two build trust with each other and share stories, the audience knows where this online relationship inevitably has to go, and a sense of dread builds. Director Katya Searle has done an excellent job guiding Munro as he revisits this painful chapter from his past at different ages; watching him relive this betrayal of trust is both heartbreaking and haunting.