There is a moment at the end of Forever Young, a walking show created by Julian Rickert and Suzanne Kersten with young people from the Irish town of Clonmel, when you find yourself alone listening to a song that was part of your adolescence. The memories flood back.
Then suddenly, in the distance, you glimpse one of the teenagers you have encountered during the previous 75 minutes. It’s a double image. He is a youth heading off to claim his future, and yet he also represents your own lost teenage self walking away from you.
There are plenty of lovely moments like this in a show that takes you on a secret journey around the city, in which you are passed like a fraying parcel from teenager to teenager.
Quite rightly, it begins in a place that makes you contemplate your own mortality, and along the way there are dares and challenges and a chance to recapture the hormonal rush of teenage love and risk-taking. Threaded through it is the myth of the kelpies, the Scottish shape-shifting spirits who often appear in equine form, and tempt humans to follow them. Some say they take you to an early death; others that those who go with the kelpies live in a land of eternal youth.
This show may lead you through the streets but it’s also a journey into the self, and there are some fascinating moments when the spectacle of the city and the spectacle of yourself meet and spark in interesting ways.
Other encounters are a little scrappy. But I’ll long remember watching three teenagers whooping down the street, totally abandoned in their desire to live life to the very full, untouched by the pressures of adult life.
• At Traverse, Edinburgh, off-site, until 30 August. Box office: 0131-228 1404.
