You might walk into I Bought A Flip Phone thinking you already know the score. The irony of technology intended to bring us closer together actually driving us further apart isn’t exactly untrod territory. In fact the observation is so passé now the phrase “what if phones, but too much” has become a shorthand for dime-a-dozen technological dystopias. But reserve your judgement, because the thread of self-awareness and introspection running through Panos Kandunias’ one-man play sets it apart from your typical “kids these days, always on their phones” screed.

That’s not to say there aren’t flavours of that throughout; our protagonist Charlie justifies his purchase by asking audience members how many hours a day they typically spend on their smartphone. He bemoans the impersonal feel of texting, the rarity of meeting potential partners online, the constant comparison fostered by social media - hence, ostensibly, his purchase of the little plastic throwback that accompanies him onstage throughout. You get the sense the phrase ‘born in the wrong generation’ will come out of his mouth any minute.

These observations are delivered in a self-consciously casual observational stand-up style and, to be honest, there were a few takes here that initially rubbed me the wrong way. For instance, there are plenty of reasons why people might prefer text to a phone call; I, like many other neurodivergent people, find the spontaneity and potential error involved in calling someone very daunting, whereas I can take time to think over the tone and content of a text before I send it. Charlie describes the ‘romance’ of a phonecall, but a lot of things can be romanticised with the right attitude. I have a framed picture on my desk of the first message I ever sent my partner, which they gave me as an anniversary gift - to me, there is romance in an archive (to quote Peggy Olson, you can’t frame a phonecall). Sooner or later, all of these things will come into the same nostalgia cycle - we already see it with Charlie idealising the writing of emails by equating it to tapping away at a typewriter like a beat poet.

I’ve also always found the observation that everyone reaches for their phone first thing in the morning a little tired. It’s true that the first thing I do when I get up is check my phone - heaven forfend I want to hear from my friends or tell my partner to have a good day or check what’s going on in the world. In decades past, no one ever looked at the guy reading the newspaper at the breakfast table and yelled, “You’re wasting your life on that thing!”. At one point he asks if, before social media, our grandparents ever wished they had someone else’s life. Don’t get me wrong, social media’s certainly made it worse, but Charlie treats wanting what someone else has like it sprang up with the invention of Instagram, when indeed it’s old enough for God to have had some thoughts about it on Mt. Sinai.

His thoughts about queer culture as a gay man have a similarly judgemental tone to them, regularly upbraiding more ‘out’ gay men as ‘too much’ and telling them to ‘tone it down’. Maybe it’s because as a fellow queer I’m more used to these spaces, but any room that has this scandalised a reaction to someone being called something as common - and, frankly, vanilla - as ‘good boy’ in the bedroom needs to heighten their threshold a tad.

There’s an subtle but ever-present inconsistency in Charlie’s outlook; despite his hatred of texting he also reviles people actually making time to ‘catch up’ in person, dismissing it out of hand as perfunctory and insincere: he shows off a dance routine from the Barbie movie he’s learned, but presumably this involved watching the movie or a tutorial on repeat - hardly morally superior to learning a TikTok dance. And most crucially, despite his insistence that his life is no longer ruled by his phone, he still leaps like Pavlov’s dog to retrieve it whenever it buzzes.

But as each call comes through and Charlie’s more polished delivery falters, it becomes increasingly clear that there’s more going on under the surface. Kandunias’ vulnerability is the show’s greatest strength. He rebuffs calls from his mother, fields enquiries from his manager wondering why he hasn’t come into work again, procrastinates responding to a good-faith message from his best friend Phoebe. Charlie’s hypocrisy is not a bug, but a feature, a product of childhood abandonment issues, internalised homophobia and low self-esteem that no technological downgrade can easily solve.

This is thrown into sharp relief with a much needed wake-up call (pun intended) from Phoebe, who tells Charlie, presumably via the very smartphone he rejects, that he needs to stop isolating himself from the people who care about him. Charlie is quick to chastise other people for never saying what they mean, but breaks when Phoebe applies the very same criticism to him. It’s a clever and thoughtful tone shift that signals Charlie is not as reliable a narrator as we first thought, reframing his more uncharitable remarks in a whole new light.

The way Charlie uses his phone is a symptom of, rather than a fix for, his disaffection, alienation and compulsive need to put up walls against the people in his life; conversely, smartphones per se aren’t the cause of society’s ills, but the fact that their technology is run by corporations for whom our attention is a commodity. A phone, smart or otherwise, is a tool, a moral neutral; it’s how we use it that counts, and Charlie eventually ends up using it to seek out the help he needs and break down the barriers he’s built.

I worry, though, that this distinction might be lost depending on which crowd sees it. The audience I was part of (which was largely an older crowd) responded so enthusiastically to Charlie’s anti-smartphone takes that the rug pull wasn’t big enough to disrupt them. Kandunias is a sharp writing talent and an affable stage presence, but part of me wishes the show had been more confrontational in its undermining of those preconceptions. Indeed, even in some Fringe reviews I’ve seen for Kandunias’ show, people still walked away thinking that the problem begins and ends with smartphones. For the thought that clearly went into its writing, I Bought a Flip Phone deserves more than this surface-level reading. It’s reflective, touching, and intellectually curious enough to delve deeper than the standard “tech bad” byline - a play ostensibly about tech concealing a very human story.