Ramona Tells Jim, Bush Theatre, London, review: fizzes with talent

This play by the actor and comedian Sophie Wu demonstrates a keen ear for the excruciating awkwardness of teenage love and perceptiveness about how lives can be blighted by a single misstep. Ramona (Ruby Bentall) from “Englandshire” is on a geography field trip to the west coast of Scotland, an earnest loner in pink-edged wellies and an anti-pill fleece. There she encounters Jim (Joe Bannister), another shy misfit, who is keen on crustacea and incredibly interested in the erosion of the coastline.

By turns coquettish and fiercely solemn, Bentall is wince-makingly funny and touching as the bullied, ostracised sixteen year old, desperate to be thought cool as a mask for her isolation. “Currently, I'm a single Pringle ready to mingle,” she declares jauntily, before frenetic dancing to Enya and the witnessing of a meteor shower lead to a rather abruptly concluded dual loss of virginity. Bannister's affable, nerdy Jim is open and confiding, famished for a soul-mate. Just as needy and insecure, Ramona is an unstoppable geyser of bad jokes and defensively assumed voices. “Oh yeehah! It was lush!” she exclaims, cow-girl fashion, on being asked whether she liked the (less than earth-shattering) sexual experience.

The intercut scenes, where the pair are reunited 15 years later, are less convincing. Dreams of becoming a marine biologist come to dust, Jim now works in fish factory and conducts rockpool rambles as a side-line. He has a 19-year-old girlfriend called Pocahontas, who feels she's wasted as a chilled-food stockist at the supermarket, and with her relentlessly materialist aspirations, would be in danger of coming across as a patronising caricature of a ‘chav’, if Amy Lennox's shrewd performance didn't indicate that this girl is as damaged as the other two. It's into this scenario that Ramona makes her surprise return to Scotland ready to own up to a lie she told on that momentous night which has shaped the course of her life and Jim's ever since.

Mel Hillyard directs an engaging production played on a turquoise set from Lucy Sierra that depicts the merge of sea and sky abstractly, as the contours on an Ordnance Survey map. But while the initial falsehood is very plausibly dramatised (a sudden, casually fatal conjunction of situation and character), the motivations feel flimsier as the consequences of this are confronted. There are vividly evocative passages – Ramona's desolate account of lonely office life, facing a wall full of blu tack stains left by the popular girl everyone still volubly misses, for instance. The idea, though, that loneliness can have a kind of toxicity that selfishly destroys other people needs to seep into the proceedings more insidiously than it does in these rather choppy scenes. Still, the show is beautifully acted and the writing, at its best, fizzes with talent.

‘Ramona Tells Jim’ is at the Bush Theatre till 21 October, bushtheatre.co.uk