My Grandpa Doesn’t Follow Me on Instagram: A Guide To Trans-generational Road-Tripping - Adelaide Fringe 2026

My Grandpa Doesn’t Follow Me on Instagram: A Guide To Trans-generational Road-Tripping

The Mill

Some stories arrive onstage with a clear theatrical architecture. Others unfold more like a long car journey: winding, unexpected, occasionally uncomfortable, and ultimately intimate. Yoz Mensch’s My Grandpa Doesn’t Follow Me on Instagram: A Guide To Trans-generational Road-Tripping belongs firmly to the latter category - a solo storytelling work that travels lightly but lands with surprising emotional weight.

The premise is deceptively simple. Mensch and their grandfather embark on a road trip from Cornwall to the Scottish Highlands. One grandparent, one grandchild, and an unspoken truth travelling quietly between them. The journey becomes both literal and emotional terrain: motorway service stations, anonymous hotel rooms, awkward silences, and small moments of shared humanity that gather significance over time.

Drawn from hundreds of real Instagram Stories posted during the trip, the performance cleverly uses the digital trace of the journey as both narrative device and emotional counterpoint. What was publicly shared online - the landscapes, the jokes, the passing oddities of travel - becomes the scaffolding for a more complicated private story. What remains unsaid, or deliberately hidden, begins to pulse beneath the surface.

Many in the audience will already sense the central tension: this is also a coming-out story. Yet what is striking about Mensch’s approach is the intelligence and restraint with which that thread is handled. The revelation is not positioned as a theatrical climax or dramatic confrontation. Instead, it exists as a quiet but constant presence, a truth carried in the car alongside a phone, snacks and overnight bags. Mensch treats the subject with notable restraint, allowing the complexity of intergenerational love to sit alongside the anxiety of disclosure without forcing the narrative toward easy catharsis.

Mensch is an engaging and quietly charismatic storyteller. There is a remarkable ease with which they invite the audience into the world of the journey, speaking with the relaxed intimacy of someone recounting a memory to friends rather than delivering a carefully constructed theatrical monologue. That conversational tone proves disarming. The audience leans in.

What emerges gradually is not simply a travelogue but a meditation on generational distance - the curious tenderness and strain that can exist between people who love each other deeply yet inhabit very different worlds.

Much of the show’s charm lies in the lovingly recreated characters encountered along the road. Motel clerks mainly, each appears with gentle comic detail and some could be extended into much longer scenes. Mensch sketches them with quick physical shifts and subtle vocal changes, building a gallery of vivid roadside encounters.

There is a consummate performance skill at work here that sneaks up on the audience. What initially appears casual and improvisational reveals itself as carefully calibrated storytelling. Beats land precisely. Moments of humour are allowed to bloom before quietly curdling into something more reflective. Yoz is a natural clown and their ability to perfectly time a pause and allow laughter to ripple (or, indeed tears to flow) is one of the show’s greatest strengths.

At its heart, My Grandpa Doesn’t Follow Me on Instagram explores the delicate emotional choreography involved in hiding parts of oneself from the people we love most. The generational gap between Mensch and their grandfather becomes a kind of emotional geography the show navigates with care. How much truth can be shared? What remains unsaid to preserve love?

The performance never pushes these questions too aggressively. Instead, Mensch allows them to hover in the background like the changing scenery outside a car window, always present, occasionally breathtaking, sometimes difficult to look at directly.

By the time the journey reaches the Scottish Highlands, the audience has travelled a considerable emotional distance as well. The show’s unexpected and joyous conclusion does not resolve every tension, nor does it attempt to offer easy answers. Instead, it leaves us with the lingering sense that connection between generations is always a negotiation: imperfect, loving, and deeply human.

In an era when social media promises constant connection, My Grandpa Doesn’t Follow Me on Instagram gently reminds us that the people closest to us may still be the ones who know the least.

It is a funny, tender, and unexpectedly haunting piece of storytelling. It is proof that sometimes the most compelling theatre begins with a simple question: what happens when we finally tell the story we’ve been quietly avoiding?

Review by Kate Gaul