Edinburgh Fringe: Tell Me Anything, Summerhall – ‘Crisp, fresh writing delivers but this is a strange perspective on dealing with an eating disorder’

Isn’t it slightly self-indulgent to make a play about how you suffered when your girlfriend had anorexia?

Successful visual metaphor: David Ralfe sports an inflatable dolphin (Alex Brenner)

Young company On the Run had a Fringe hit a couple of years ago with a real story about a young woman whose father died; this year, they’re back with another work revisiting teenage struggles. Tell Me Anything sees writer-performer David Ralfe recall being a 15-year-old, desperately trying to help his girlfriend Kate through an eating disorder.

Things start perkily enough. He’s clutching an inflatable dolphin, because the guidance to loved ones is to be like a dolphin, swimming alongside offering “warmth, guidance and gentle nudging”. The sufferer ultimately has to find their own way to swim to shore, but the dolphin can make the journey with them.

Ralfe directly addresses the audience in this one-man show, persuasively taking us back to his teenage years when he was madly in love with Kate; his diary was full of exclamation marks, and his delivery apes it. Ralfe is peppily determined to beat the eating disorder. He wants to rescue her; he wants to be the hero, to beat it, to fix things.

Of course, it’s not that easy. A teenage boy isn’t equipped with the tools for this. Tell Me Anything finds loose, not wholly effective visual metaphors for this. The stage is filled with tubes, wobbly and precarious; Ralfe periodically moves them, altering the pattern, and if trying to solve a puzzle. But when they finally topple, it doesn’t feel terribly significant. More successful is that dolphin – a comic reminder of the challenge of being upbeat, but later, it will shrink and shrivel with more poignancy than you’d think an inflatable toy ever could. It’s a rich image, coming to represent the shrinking body of Kate, their deflating relationship, and the air going out of Ralfe’s determination to solve everything.

Because Tell Me Anything is, really, less about Kate’s experience of anorexia and more about Ralfe’s experience of floundering in the face of extreme emotions and the inability to make everything better. He repeatedly says, “it’s not about me…” but this show really is. This is acknowledged, but still not quite worked through sufficiently – occasional nods to his life now, and relationship woes, feel almost gratuitously tossed in. And it’s hard not to feel that it’s self-indulgent to make a show about how he felt when someone else had a bad time. It’s a genuine, understandable response to a horrible situation, but it isn’t quite potent enough to sustain the show.

That said, the writing is crisp and fresh and the commitment total; this is candid work, showing scars in order to elicit emotion. But it’s never manipulative, and swerves all of the many potential potholes of making a play about an eating disorder. And Ralfe is a compelling performer, in both his teenage bubbly optimism and in the dark, hard flashes of anger that crack through.