Reviewer rating:

Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

By Troy Nankervis
Gasworks Arts Park
until February 1

WRITTEN by Troy Nankervis, Transit is drawn from the young playwright's travels in Europe last year. The script is condensed from six hours of interviews with a dozen fellow globetrotters, with fragments of the original recordings played intermittently.

Despite this distillation, dialogue often sounds verbatim, though not in an expressive or stylistic way. A narcissistic 19-year-old musing about their transformative overseas jaunt needs some reworking to become an engaging monologue.

Set in a London hostel, three Australian undergraduates meet in a dormitory and begin sharing backpacker stories. These are sheltered characters, at least one of whose parents are funding their metamorphosis, who believe a plane is like a cocoon from which they'll emerge a more authentic self, aware and assured.

Cliched escapades and platitudes are relayed like revelations, yet their journeys are as cosy as their lives back home: they hang out with other tourists, get wasted and have sex (sometimes even fall in love), visit monuments and purchase trinkets to remember it all by; culture shock is Parisians who can't speak English and difficulty navigating the Metro. The lessons they learn are uncomfortably earnest, with talk of destiny, seizing the moment and learning to say goodbye. ''If it's 10am and you're in Paris and you want a creme brulee, just do it!'' one character says with unalloyed sincerity.

Cameron Stewart's direction is loose, the performances unfocused and the material jejune. One gets the impression that all involved still need to accumulate a little more life experience to draw upon.