Love Letters To The Public Transport System, Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh

Molly Taylor in Love Letters To The Public Transport System" (Colin Hattersley)

Molly Taylor’s fascination with public transport is just contrived enough to be true, an apparent result of her having started one passionate but subsequently failed relationship with a long multi-stage journey from her home in Glasgow to Brixton, where she and her sometime partner would have their first fateful meeting. Things went well.

So well, if you can suspend your disbelief, that she chose to contact everyone responsible for her journey to thank them personally, all the way up to Boris Johnson.

As high-concepts go, this National Theatre of Scotland presentation is a square peg bashed into a round hole and sanded beautifully so you don’t even see the join.

The Liverpudlian Taylor is a wonderful one-woman storyteller, a gregarious young chatterbox with a note of sadness in her voice.

She relates her meetings with bus drivers, most poignantly a retired man from Leeds whose thirty-five year career enabled him to imagine a kind of geography of people along his route, and tells sweet but unrelated stories, for example how actor Tam Dean Burn’s sometime Fringe success Venus as a Boy stemmed from a chance meeting on a bus.

It’s undeniably twee, but by the end you might look at faceless public servants and the coincidences which have sculpted your own life with a newfound fondness and gratitude.