Edinburgh review: Tell Me Anything (Summerhall)

When David Ralf was 15, he was in love. More in love, perhaps, than he’ll ever be – than any of us will be – again. "I love her, I love her, I love her," his diary records; three exclamation marks. He and his girlfriend had a song and, whenever its first line played – "I don’t get many things right the first time" – they’d lock eyes and gaze at one another in silence.

She, Kate, had an eating disorder. She’d starve herself thin, make herself sick, sometimes self-harm. This isn’t the stock image of anorexia – a stick-thin teenage girl staring forlornly at her reflection – but the lies, the denial and the secrecy of it aren’t entirely unfamiliar either. "It’s not about vanity," Kate would insist. "It’s about control."

The question is whose vanity? Whose control? Aged 15, Ralf took it on himself, trying to help, even to heal, her, and, as he reads out his diary entries, you glimpse a teenage boy out to play the hero. "It’s not about me," he tells all these adults – parents, nurses, doctors – but in stressing that selflessness, he’s almost revelling in responsibility. When he wears her jumpers to school, it’s a public display. They don’t just shag, they – quote – make love. He’s pulled towards adulthood. She wants to squeeze into her old, child-sized clothes.

Ralf captures the contradictions of the teenage experience; its weight, so often overlooked for pettier anxieties, set against its naivety. At one level, we could all learn from his youthful devotion, but it’s selfish and smothering too. Flashing forwards to a (very) recent break-up, Ralf reveals how little he’s learned. Only this time, it’s his issues under scrutiny; his need for control, his egocentricity.

Rich as it is, Tell Me Anything never fully justifies its existence onstage. A well-crafted memoir, it could transfer to radio without loss. Ralf rearranges cardboard tubes on the floor – a symbol of both his need for control and the entropy of life – but it’s an illustrative act, not a charged one. Flickering lights and low-level rumbles over-compensate with ominosity.

At times, you wonder why he’s made this: for our benefit or for his own? The more he lingers recent, raw events, the more Ralf seems to be processing his own personality; confessing for the sake of confessing. It’s as if he’s working through past wrongs, rather than trying to right them in others, and, in doing so, Tell Me Anything glosses over the ethics of using other people’s issues for his own art. Nor does it pin down wider social currents – why boys carry burdens and girls, insecurities, and why teenagers are left to sort their shit out with so little support from adults. After all, as Ralf proves, we all learn from life. Nobody gets many things right the first time.

Tell Me Anything runs at Summerhall at 17.45 until 28 August (except 15 August).

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