Well, this is fun. We’ve queued outside Toitu Settlers Museum and are now piling onto a vintage yellow and orange DCC bus, the very smell of which brings vivid memories flooding back. We are going on an actual bus trip.

It’s called an experiment in mobile theatre, but then all Feral Grace’s offerings are experiments, from Are You Game? about date rape for Fringe 2015, to the wild burlesque of the outrageous Lads on Tour Cabaret.

Emma Feather Shaw in her peaked cap makes a rather eccentric but acceptable Conductor, squawking indignantly at tardy and embarrassed customers, “A twenty dollar note? This is a bus, not a fucking bank!! And don’t think you can sit together!”  Somehow we are all sardined on, avoiding the ‘Reserved’ signs on some seats. “Actually, they’re broken, but ‘Broken’ doesn’t look too good, so we put ‘Reserved’.”

And we’re off, rattling and wheezing, on the route to St Clair, where the surf is especially wild tonight. Along the way, we pick up more passengers, who sit without noticeable consequences on the Reserved/Broken seats, sometimes scrambling over others to reach a seat. One lanky lad (who I suspect is Peter Croft, a Feral staple – no programmes, of course) is shouting into his mobile, “Gazza! How awesome was the gig last night?!” He is interrupted by a roar of fury from an intense dark-haired chap: “Shut the fuck up!”

So we are here for that most delicious of human pastimes, brazen people-watching. Many of the vignettes seem to have developed from overheard snippets of real-life bus conversations, but they take off into the realm of the absurd as a twitchy paranoid bloke in a red jersey gazes intently at the boy behind him, demanding, “Are you a cyborg?”  Don’t answer him, the regulars advise. Last week he was convinced they were all androids.

Two Zones Please manages to be both charmingly casual and extremely well-organised. Our Basil Fawlty of a Conductor, her piercingly carrying voice a godsend on public transport, commands the bus and cheerfully abuses her ‘regulars’. “Every day, it happens every day on the A13, you two bickering! You could get on at the Gardens and go a short distance, but no, you have to travel the whole route just so you can bicker with each other!”

Shaw (sometimes known as Feather Unsure, but on this occasion inviting us to call her Patsy) holds the performance together with her excellent MC skills. While two or three amusing little encounters are happening round the bus, she can pull us all together with her rambling, chirpy commentary. Some is pure gossip – the houses of wealthier locals; the great cocaine scandal on the esplanade – while some has political bite. We are invited to recall buildings or businesses that were once on the route, and grieve together for the Hillside Workshops that closed with the loss of so many jobs, causing such hardship in South Dunedin. 

A young woman, possibly called Alex, climbs aboard in some agitation: she doesn’t normally travel by bus but her car is bust. We drop her in Hillside Rd, but she’s waiting at the stop on our return – the garage can’t fix it. One of the boys promptly tries to sell her his clapped out car. No chance.

We are encouraged to think about the virtues of travelling by bus. I am already appreciating every minute of the ride and promising myself I really will take a bus more often, though I doubt the passengers will be as funny as this marvellously diverse bunch.

Meantime we are chugging back through the Octagon, obediently admiring the splendid architecture, on our way to the Gardens. Patsy is inspired to launch into a brilliant riff describing the monkeys once kept there, and how akin we are to them, just a human zoo after all.

It is a very friendly, unthreatening brand of interactive theatre, and we feel safe with Feather Shaw in good-natured but totally confident control. I’m proud my guest is the best at answering the questions on Dunedin’s fascinating past, as we rattle on to Normandy.

We all have silly grins on our faces, grown-ups who know they are behaving childishly, but don’t care. Because it’s fun. We play Sweet and Sour, seeing which of the people we pass will wave back, as a sunset sky the colours of the bus welcomes us back to Toitu.

The mix of nostalgia and novelty have made for great entertainment – no wonder the season is booked out, the queuers arguing with the latecomers.  And there’s Conductor Feather, urging them to fight each other for a seat, while vintage bus driver Brucie chuckles. Fun.

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