Love Letters to the Public Transport System
Molly Taylor is an immensely likeable and endearing 28 year-old writer/actor who’s keen to share her joys and sorrows on the bus with us for 70 minutes in one of the two studios in the Assembly Rooms.
Presented by the National Theatre of Scotland, her show is sweet and charming, but nothing special in its rambling, diary-like format of anecdotal narrative. Heart-broken at the end of an affair, Molly decides to make love to the transport system instead, touched by the efforts of bus and train drivers everywhere to keep her going.
She even feels impelled to write to Boris Johnson for no other reason than that she thinks he ought to know what she’s up to; her sometimes surprising range of references include a bus driver in Bury (and his wife), small coffee shops, Acton Town bus depot and the mother-in-law of rugby star Garry Schofield OBE.
Her restlessness itself becomes a raison d’être which is fair enough, but not sufficient to fire a really rich or meaningful theatre experience: having a lot to say is not necessarily the same as having something to say, and there’s a sense that, if she weren’t so beguiling a performer, you’d merely think of the show as the so-what musings of an insistent chatterbox.
On the other hand, the liveliness and freshness of her writing does a good job of disguising this weakness, and if we were all to become as considerate as Molly in our dealings with public transport workers, perhaps the service would improve and they’d all cheer up a bit.
