Wondrous Flitting

After a hilarious first scene and a promising half-hour, Mark Thomson’s Wondrous Flitting subsides into “Ponderous Twitting.” As an advert for the Edinburgh Lyceum, where Thomson is artistic director, it’s a huge disappointment.

At first, the play combines magic realism with everyday banality, rather like Anthony Neilson’s Realism. The holy “flitting” (or, floating) house of Loretto has plummeted into fat Sam’s Scottish semi.

Sam, played by sympathetic James Corden lookalike Grant O’Rourke, contemplates his father’s legs protruding from beneath designer Kai Fischer’s holy wall – “You can never bring in a wall,” wails Shakespeare’s mechanical; oh yes you can – and his mother’s shouting.

He goes for help at his blind, wheelchair-bound grandfather’s, encounters two kids in the park who accuse him of being a “paedo,” visits a sado-masochistic dentist and learns that his girlfriend’s contracted chlamydia.

Nice, eh? All these, other roles, are resourcefully played by Liam Brennan and Molly Innes, so you get the overwhelming impression of an epic done on the cheap.

But the play goes nowhere, dwindling to a series of phoney plot jolts and the idea that the “flitting house” – reputedly the venue where Christ was conceived in Nazareth – is an illusionary ruse of Derren Brown.