Love Letters to Public Transport

Love Letters to the Public Transport System was actually inspired by a love affair, at a time when I was feeling very lucky to have met someone wonderful. When you look back over chance meetings it’s always incredible to think that there are so many ways you could have missed each other, so I decided to trace back the journeys I had made to get me to the right place at the right time for that meeting to happen.

I decided to write to the transport companies who had taken me on a series of journeys, from Glasgow to Bradford, to Liverpool, and down to London where lots of new doors opened for me. I wanted to try and find the bus and train drivers that make my life possible, as I’ve never been a driver so I rely heavily on public transport. I decided I’d make the project into a piece of theatre, and Love Letters to the Public Transport System was born. I didn’t know how the search would end when I started it, whether I’d find who I was looking for or not, so it was a really exciting thing to undertake.

As part of my research I spoke to other people who had had significant or life changing moments on public transport, and I found the most wonderful stories. Tales of meeting partners, work colleagues, life-saving journeys all began to fall in my lap.

In terms of how it relates to the rest of my work – this is only the second time I have written and performed my own material, so I’m really learning how to tell stories. My first piece A la Carte (The Arches 2010) was a one-woman show about a search to find the perfect dining experience, and it was staged as a dinner party with the audience around the table with me. In terms of my current show, I’ve embarked on another ‘search’, so I think my work is about trying to find significance in the mundane parts of our lives, things that we can so easily overlook. Dinner parties and public transport are hardly the most dramatic of subjects! But to me it’s the small, daily ways in which our lives are enriched by those things that make those subjects important.