Imagine running into an old teenage friend in a sauna. How would you react? Hiding – as writer, performer and spoken word artist Molly Naylor did – is an option many of us would probably consider. Naylor’s third Edinburgh Fringe offering, If Destroyed Still True, is a piece of work inspired by this encounter; in it she embodies the “shambolic and ramshackle” punk ethos and the “authenticity or pure of heart-ness” of being a teenager. Surprisingly, this isn’t the first show I’ve heard of being conceived in a sauna, but Naylor’s overwhelmingly honest approach to making and speaking about her work is something you don’t encounter every day.

Naylor hid from this school friend in the sauna and the encounter made her realise “how much I’d wilfully forgotten about being a teenager”. She’d tried as hard as she could to separate herself from this part of her life, but realised that “things like social networking make that quite hard because people pop up, don’t they?” We can probably all answer in the affirmative to that one, and I’m sure everyone will relate to the feeling of looking at these people on Facebook, and making judgements about them and their lives, as Naylor found herself doing. The sauna incident generated the question that drives the show: “are we so fragile still as grownups that anything can take us back to those times?”

As with most of her previous work (Whenever I Get Blown Up I Think of You, 2010; My Robot Heart, 2012), If Destroyed Still True treads the line between autobiography and fiction. Naylor is telling a fictional story about a teenager, whilst also working in her response to the sauna encounter and what this made her think about in her own life. Hers is a very organic approach to making work:

“As a human rather than as an artist I think I’m always knocking around a theme, something I’m interested in, and talking about and thinking about. So I suppose for a bit in my life my theme was teenage stuff. My life and my art are really linked…The things I’m interested in talking about and discussing with people in real life, my compulsion then is to make work about it and explore it to really figure out what I think about it.”

It might sound self indulgent, but if her work is anything like speaking to her in person then it won’t be difficult to engage with. For the audience, Naylor thinks the experience of If Destroyed Still True is “somewhere between a gig, a show, stand-up and storytelling. It’s not a play, no one’s acting. It’s just telling some things.” Naylor isn’t acting, she tells me, “because I can’t” and she also explains “I haven’t developed any kind of slick pitch yet, and I just don’t think it’s that kind of show and I’m bad at doing it.” It’s this level of honesty and comical self-deprecation that makes her endearing, and will surely win any audience over.

In If Destroyed Still True Naylor performs with musician Iain Ross from the band Bear Suit, which incidentally was a major lyrical influence on Naylor when working on the show. Ross developed the show with Naylor in a process that consisted of the two sharing teenage stories, taking inspiration from each other and doing scratch performance from a very early stage. Naylor admits that delving into her teenage history was at first “as you might imagine quite cringey”, but it was these discussions with Ross that made her turn around in her thinking. “He had quite a lot of positive memories and he would describe these shining nights to me, these parties and little moments that he remembers really strongly and it made me think about it in a different way”. Through discussions with Ross, Naylor realised she did have nice memories about being a teenager “and I started to think about teenagers generally in a different way and started to think about the good things we can take from our teenage selves”.

I suspect that any audience of If Destroyed Still True may have a very similar experience; you might enter thinking that as a teenager you were nothing but “this spotty, arrogant idiot. Idealistic, naïve and yet really opinionated and obnoxious as well”, but it is certainly Naylor’s hope that you won’t leave thinking this. Through the process of working on the show, Naylor has come to believe that “in an ideal world we would leave behind the insecurity, and the sadness and the heartbreak, and the mistakes we made… but we’d take the joyful moments and the authenticity and the ability to see the truth of something for what it is”.

Naylor and Ross have worked to make the form of the show reflect its themes and something that was very important to Naylor was “the ideology of not being very good at it and just trying”, the spirit of not being afraid to “have a bash” that we lose as adults. Ross’s music acts as an underscore to the fictional elements of the show, but to join the fictional and autobiographical moments there are sections where the two perform together. This decision was inspired by the fact that as a teenager Naylor desperately wanted to be in a band, the conceit is that Ross is teaching Naylor to play guitar as the show progresses. Naylor admits “it really does scare me to sing and play guitar on stage” and describes her musical contribution as “really rubbish”.

Naylor hopes this fear comes across and is something the audience can engage with, a desire that conforms to her admission that “it’s not a very flattering show. It’s really honest”. The “worst stuff” from her teenage life, and from her adult judgment of teenagers, has made it in. “I’m telling the audience things that might make them judge me. I’m that level of honest, but I sort of do that in all my shows really because I think it’s really important as a performer to make that sacrifice and take that risk for the greater good of the scenes and the ideas”.

If Destroyed Still True is on at Forest Fringe during Edinburgh Fringe, and I imagine it will certainly stand out from the more generic fringe offerings. Naylor explains how she’s excited to be performing at Forest Fringe because it’s “a good place to take a risk. Edinburgh used to be about taking risks, but now it’s more just about a show case of your best work and trying to get a million reviews”. This year Naylor doesn’t care so much about getting those four or five golden stars, she just wants “as many people to see it as possible”. With her natural aptitude for storytelling, her honesty and “pure of heart-ness” I’m sure this will happen.

If Destroyed Still True is at Forest Fringe from 6-17 August (not 11) at 6:30pm.