JUST when you think you’re getting to grips with plethora of acronyms which pepper the social networking ether, something comes along to knock your cool status down a peg or 10 and send you cap in hand to Google.

And so it was after seeing members of Live’s Youth Theatre perform Lee Mattinson’s play this week. The first thing I did on arriving home was locate my laptop and search for the meaning of ROFL.

It had peppered the status-updates and wall-writing interaction of the nine Facebook characters cast in the sharply and very funnily written Jonathan Likes This.

I was initially worried we wouldn’t be able to print the longhand version in a family newspaper but, as it turned out to be “Rolling On the Floor Laughing”, it seems my fears were unfounded. Cleverly presented via the cast spending 90% of the time staring forwards and never at each other, the play explores the phenomenon of Facebook and its effects on the real-life relationships of the teenage generation, who have never known life without texts, emails, wall-postings, pokes and other once-removed methods of communication.

After Jonathan Fudge’s sister announced her brother had died in his sleep, his Facebook friends were struggling to come to terms with the news. But when Jonathan starts replying to messages on his Facebook wall, they start to wonder whether he’s gone at all...

Mattinson has captured the slang-laden, sometimes offhand and often acerbic dialect of the 21st-century teen, with frightening (for a mother of a pre-schooler) accuracy and very funny results. Meanwhile, the young actors were collectively terrific as a group of young people whose isolation from the real world has become the worrying norm.