IT’S Christmas time, and, for Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre, that can only mean one thing ... a play that bucks the national trend by having zero to do with the Yuletide festival. The playhouse, which defines itself as “Scotland’s new writing theatre”, has, in recent years, developed a tradition of offering a non-Christmas alternative to the pantomimes and festive family theatre that are ubiquitous every December.

This year that tradition is driven forward by Wilf, a new comedy by James Ley, the author of the acclaimed play Love Song To Lavender Menace. The new drama is about a young, gay man (called Calvin) who seeks to escape from an abusive relationship by, in short order, getting his driving licence and falling in love with his car.

The only problem is, Calvin is rubbish at driving tests and, after 104 driving lessons, is trying to secure his licence at the 12th attempt. “The gay thing has got nothing to do with the car love,” Ley explains, when I catch up with him during rehearsals.

Wilf (the play takes its name from Calvin’s car, a rusty, second-hand Volkswagen Polo) is, the playwright acknowledges, built on Calvin’s entirely “nonsensical” reasoning that escape from his “abusive, toxic relationship” can only come through passing his driving test. “Why doesn’t he just leave?,” the writer asks rhetorically.

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However, such cognitive dissonance has been the very stuff of the wilder theatrical comedies going back to Shakespeare, Molière and Goldoni. So, Ley is in good company.

The idea for Wilf came to him, he admits, when he was trying to come up with a concept for a film. He had adapted Love Song To Lavender Menace for the screen, and wanted to take another crack at a movie script.

However, just as he was envisioning Calvin driving off into the sunset on a TV or cinema screen near you, an opportunity to pitch play ideas to the Traverse arose. The writer quickly revised his screenplay idea to a theatre script pitch, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Wilf is a comic play about serious subjects, such as mental health difficulties and “queer loneliness”. It is important to Ley that his play conveys sympathy when it comes to matters of mental and emotional health.

“I have a bipolar disorder myself,” he explains. “I was very conscious that I didn’t want to stigmatise that or make light of it.”

Equally, however, he was keen “not to shy away from” creating a character “who’s having a bit of a mental health crisis”. In fact, the writer believes approaching mental health issues from a comedic perspective can assist in “seeing them in all their realness”.

BROACHING such potentially difficult subjects in a comic play is, the playwright contends, “about being generous with the audience”. The writer points to one of his favourite stage dramas, The Wonderful World Of Dissocia, by Scottish dramatist Anthony Neilson.

Dissocia is an extraordinary, gloriously imaginative comic play, but also a deeply sympathetic imagining of the condition of a young woman who is suffering from dissociative disorder. “That play doesn’t shy away from the huge, dark elements of that story,” Ley observes.

With Wilf, he wanted to create a drama in a similarly sympathetic-yet-comic vein. Thankfully, the Traverse’s artistic director Gareth Nicholls agreed. By August of this year, during the Edinburgh Fringe, Wilf was being staged in the form of a performed reading.

Crucially, says the playwright, that early, work-in-progress production boasted the Irish actor Michael Dylan (a superb, longstanding performer on the Scottish stage) in the role of Calvin. The actor made the part his own from the outset and Ley finds it hard to imagine the central character being performed by anyone else. “It’s been very important having Michael. It’s a part he’s really embraced.”

In terms of the concept at the heart of the drama, the writer explains: “I just thought it would be funny if, in extremis, somebody was so hurt by a relationship that they fell in love with an object. Then I came up with the idea of a car.”

Ley is, he admits, one of those people who has given names to his own cars. “It’s that weird thing where you create a little personality for a car,” he says, “and it can be taken too far.”

In the play, Calvin’s relationship with Wilf is his way of “putting himself back together again” following the disastrous love affair he is escaping. However, the writer is quick to point out, he doesn’t expect audiences to believe that the route to happiness and good mental health resides in a second-hand German car.

There is, I’m pleased to report, another human force in the drama in the shape of Thelma, who Ley describes as Calvin’s “driving instructor/therapist”. Played by the ever-excellent Irene Allan, Thelma has, conveniently enough, recently made a career switch from therapy.

As the writer explains, when we first meet the play’s two protagonists, they are in the midst of major life changes. Calvin and Thelma are, Ley continues, asking themselves “quite common questions” that people continue to have, “even in the midst of the huge political challenges we face”.

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WE may be battling Covid, catastrophic climate change and global political instability, but, the writer contends, people are still drawn towards the existential questions: “Why am I here? What am I supposed to be doing with my life? Who am I?”

Within this maelstrom of self-exploration, “Wilf comes along for Calvin as a split part of himself”, says the writer. Indeed, Ley is enjoying the extent to which director Nicholls has picked up this somewhat outlandish notion and run with it.

“I think he’s responded to me taking a few risks by taking risks of his own,” he says. “I’m really pleased that he’s done that.

“It makes me feel like we’re in this together,” the playwright adds, with a laugh.

“If people are grossed out by this story, it’s not just my fault.”

Wilf is at the Traverse, Edinburgh, December 8-24: traverse.co.uk