David Greig's new play is about directionlessness. "A person needs to know who they are, and where they are going," it tells us. Perhaps it's inevitable, then, that the play itself lacks a sense of direction. Like much of Greig's work, it's more meditation on themes than narrative drama.
His clutch of confused characters range from Scotland to California in search of meaning in their lives. Their searches are illuminated by moments of resonant poetic imagery, but they fail to coalesce into a meaningful whole.
Greig has cast himself as a character in the play, which was inspired by his first trip to the US, in June 2000. Billy Boyd stars as the writer's chirpy alter ego, who gets stabbed in the gut within hours of touchdown in San Diego. Elsewhere in the city, the pilot of his flight hires a prostitute, who can't find the way to his apartment. Back in England, that pilot's damaged daughter falls in love with a man who's prepared to eat her flesh. Their signature tune? Love Me Tender. Throughout, Boyd-as-Greig peers down on proceedings from his aircraft window, the God his characters seek, but can't find.
There are some lovely interactions here. Callum Cuthbertson and Paul Thomas Hickey make a terrific double act as San Diego drifters living out of a suitcase. Greig splices in entertainingly OTT scenes from a TV melodrama about a hijacked aeroplane. But the play as a whole lacks dramatic impetus. In Greig's own production, it unfolds at the soporific pace of a dream. Its enigmatic, portentous atmosphere (heightened by a constant ambient drone, courtesy of Graeme Miller) precludes emotional involvement. And Greig's strands remain tenuously integrated and intellectually elusive. By exploring so much - God, identity, the meaning of life - the play diffuses its focus and ends up with practically nothing surprising to say.
