Wondrous Flitting @ The Traverse

Mark Thomson's Wondrous Flitting has a gloriously inventive beginning. The Holy House of Loreto has disappeared from its location in Italy, only to crash into the household of an average Scottish family. This powerful enticement to a prospective audience may also be the play's greatest flaw. With such an original and dramatic opening, lead character Sam's spiritual journey seems an unavoidable series of anticlimaxes. In a comic twist that seizes an easy laugh, he abandons his father (who is pinned between the two houses) and his mother, who is stuck in the other room. This jars awkwardly with any empathy we may have felt for Sam and is typical of a play that often falls short in its bringing together of the sacred and the profane.

The humour of the show is very broad, with a reliance on the word “fuck” that feels forced and wholly unnatural in the mouths of the characters. Add to this a protagonist who is completely self-obsessed and one quickly loses interest in the philosophical and religious agenda the show has. There is some very heavy-handed, overly wrought dialogue in which Sam's burgeoning awareness is played out with or against other characters. Rather than illustrating these positions Thomson has the characters explain them, with examples such as the Eastern European cleaner completely changing the range of her vocabulary to allow the requisite eloquence at the climax of her existential speech.

The strengths of the production are in Kai Fischer's set design, which not only makes a wonderful job of the opening spectacle, but is also flexible enough to accommodate the various settings Sam finds himself in. Further to this are the performances of Liam Brennan and Molly Innes, who are committed to the variety of transformations they undergo, despite the caricatured societal tropes of their characters.

Wondrous Flitting is an ambitious production that seeks to examine the “big questions” of existence through a comedic lens, but is underdeveloped both in terms of what it wishes to say and how it approaches the issues. If the play had been merely a comedy it would be easier to forgive, but it is the attempts at genuine drama and philosophical introspection which hamper its progress from the start.