Night Bus

A schoolboy with nowhere to go, a moonlighting transvestite crooning Marilyn Monroe songs, an elderly woman with a 61-stone brother at home and a packet of Earl Grey in her cloth shopping bag. This is a night bus and all human life is here. Character after character briefly boards and alights, one melting into another - the mad, the bad, the sad, the shit-faced, the lewd.

There is a dream-like quality about night buses that should in theory translate well into this series of short vignettes, written and performed by Linda Marlowe and Sarah-Louise Young. The pair—Young in particular—display admirable versatility in their character acting, yet the piece as a whole verges on monotonous. Again and again, self-consciously unexpected mini-denouements come across more as bad punchline than pathetic tragi-comedy. 

The problem lies in the meld of verbatimesque dialogue—a starkly unfiltered form of reality—and the play’s absurd tendencies, the latter unfortunately diminishing the power of the former. If we are meant to leave the auditorium thinking that people (those who take night buses in particular) are strange, contradictory, clown-like creatures, this point would be made far more convincingly with less superimposed surrealism. 

Some interludes work better than others – I particularly liked the pair of expectant mothers feuding over the last empty seat. Even so, it felt a long hour’s journey.