The Beatles are on the wireless, Lyndon B Johnson is in the White House, and boy scouts Grasshopper and Ace are covered in smears of mud and badges of honour. They frolic and tear through the imagined landscape, conjured up by performers Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland, finishing each other’s sentences, jostling and playfighting. 

This is the third year Rice and Roland have brought work to the Fringe, and both previous productions have been noted for their sharp absurdity. A Letter To Lyndon B Johnson Or God: Whoever Reads This First feels more earnest than absurd however, playing with nostalgia and boyhood tropes (subverting them sometimes with tragic intrusions of adult brutality into these carefree boys’ world) in its quest to capture the spirit of young masculinity. Both Rice and Roland are commanding, energetic performers, frantically whipping through overlapping stories of the boys, as they hurtle from playfighting into cold, hard war. 

They are at their best when melding physical and verbal storytelling, syncing the punctuation of their movements to the narrative’s rhythm. But by channelling such archetypal figures and tropes (like the all-American boy-soldiers-to-men of Grasshopper and Ace), the pitfall is that it feels like a story we have heard before. 

Xhloe And Natasha: A Letter To Lyndon B Johnson Or God: Whoever Reads This First, TheSpace @ Niddry Street, until 24 August, times vary.