The Etcetera Theatre in Camden is another fringe venue that I happen to hold a candle for, once you get past the on-the-seedy-side pub that it crowns. I love that it hosts a new writing festival. I love that it gives new companies, new writers and new genres the opportunity to find their feet and check themselves out. I love that there is always a chance that you’ll see something special – something that only a few people have shared with you, but something that you can reference anecdotally when it’s transported from that small black box to somewhere where hundreds can see it and everyone can bang on about it. Then you can reminisce to those glory supporters that you were there first.

Mind Your Head theatre plays the fuzzy reminiscence card nicely in their play Outgrown. We see a familiar friendship that is founded on memories, but not much else besides – the kind of friend you are friends with simply because you always have been. Apart from history there’s a lack of common ground, differing interests and polar ways of seeing the world. Or perhaps it runs deeper than even that: perhaps one of you has kept a secret that sprouted somewhere in that history and changed the future behaviour of your counterpart forever.

Mind Your Head questions whether such a secret can trump the overwhelming volume of a personal history. They find that it can temporarily debilitate the friendship: change the undercurrent of it, without ever completely kiboshing it. They attempt to transport us from the present day – in which the detrimentally sensible Lizzie (Paige Wilson) is moving out of her childhood home to a new flat with her long-term boyfriend, with the aid of her childhood best friend and fly-by-the-seat of her pants hippy Beth (played sharply by Lucy Hagan-Walker) – to the 90s and their teenage years, with mixed effect. Their 90s characters are onlookers at a classic teenage party. Both actors multi-role, as Cassie (Hagan-Walker), the archetypal girl who is desperate to be popular, and Alex (Wilson), the stereotypical Jack-the-lad, overdosing on testosterone and oblivious with it. Hagan-Walker and Wilson’s character transitions are laboured and lengthy, yet there is little differentiation in character as Wilson transforms from Lizzie to Alex. The real thrum of the secret is hazy: what actually happened to Beth on the evening of that party isn’t explicit enough and there isn’t enough of an empathetic drive for the audience to try and fathom it.

Seemingly the fruits of Mind Your Head’s labour is the creation of the 90s world. The props and the soundtrack (which I’d love a copy of) abundantly stimulate the memory of its audience. Evocative splashes of the Backstreet Boys are intermingled with very welcome reminders of the era: Sweet Valley High and Jacqueline Wilson are amongst those that transport us there. Despite this, the language and mannerisms of the characters don’t change from one era to the next (no one said “banter” in the 90s, no-one). We are enabled to reminisce and that is the charm of the narrative.

All in all, I wanted the narrative to be a little bit less obvious. I wanted more depth and I didn’t want a ‘twist’ to be handed to me on a silver platter. In the spirit of reminiscence, Outgrown reminded me of a G.C.S.E. devised piece, when it was clever to write monologues where one character finished the last one’s sentences without interaction. If it were a G.C.S.E devised piece I’d have doubtlessly given it an A*, but if the truth be told I’ve outgrown that era.

Outgrown is playing at the Etcetera Theatre until 3 May. For more information and tickets, see the Etcetera Theatre website.