Love Letters to the Public Transport System, Traverse Theatre, Review

Rating (out of 5)
4
Show details
Company
National Theatre of Scotland
Production
Molly Taylor (writer and director), Colin Bell (technical stage manager)
Performers
Molly Taylor
Running time
50mins

‘Trains and boats and planes’, says the Burt Bacharach song about love being lost through public transport. Maybe buses don’t cut it in the States, but they do in Molly Taylor’s story telling ‘work-in-progress’ about love being found through public transport. 

With only a double bus seat and a spilling used ticket bin on stage, Molly talks garrulously in her NW English accent that adapted beautifully to West coast Scottish when her story moved to Glasgow. 

Her warmth, openness and honesty  shone through her real stories of these ‘million tiny decisions’ that take people to their fate. Her bright and positive world view prefers to see a series of beginnings rather than focus on endings. She manages to see a pattern in the randomness of life and is ‘grateful for the joy’ it creates or maybe rather in the molecular chain of strangeness that can result in love, using the lovely pun of being ‘transported’.

She tells real and recognisable stories that, as she warned the audience, could easily be related to by most people. As a fellow non- driver, frequent public transport user and letter of commendation writer, I could relate to much of this young and inspiring writer’s sentiments through the various characters’ tales that she expertly and seemingly breathlessly related.

Molly invites audience members to comment on this experiment so it will be interesting to see a more developed version in future, though what she has produced here would be hard to better.

Show runs til Sat 5 Mar, 8pm (£6/£4)