WHEN we’re faced with a dilemma that affects us deeply, it seems like the most important thing in the world. The problem can be so all-consuming we simply can’t conceive of it ever seeming trivial. Yet when we find a way to take a step back or to see things from a different angle, our whole attitude changes. A few days pass and we can’t even remember what the issue was.

Michael Dylan and Sally Reid

Mikey and Addie, a new show for the over-nines by Andy Manley and Rob Evans, starts with the long-shot. Before we find out anything about Sally Reid’s Addie or Michael Dylan’s Mikey, we’re taken on a brisk journey through the solar system, prettily realised on Shona Reppe’s twinkling set. It reminds us that, however distressing our situation, our hang-ups count for almost nothing when set against the magnitude of the universe.

Only then can we come in for the close-up. Now we discover a bit more about 10-year-old Mikey, naively living with the fantasy that his father is a spaceman, even though pretty much everyone else knows the reality is far more prosaic. Meanwhile, the comically punctilious Addie, taking her role as playground monitor far too seriously, is about to learn there are different levels of truth and lies in the grown-up world and things are not quite as clear cut as she’d thought.

When Mikey discovers his father has no connection with NASA and is simply an absent parent – and a lowly plumber to boot – it’s a shock he can barely comprehend. It changes everything: his self-perception, his youthful romanticism, his relationship with his mother and his understanding of his place in the world. It feels like the most pressing crisis anyone could live through.

Yet, however sympathetic we are to his dilemma, there’s a bit of us that sees the bigger picture. Mikey is not the first child with divorced parents. We know he’ll get over it.

Paradoxically, this is the play’s moral as well as its key weakness. By focusing on a story that is less important than the central character thinks it is, Manley and Evans are stuck with a tale that is not terribly compelling. It may be a big deal to Mikey, but it isn’t very dramatic to us.

At the same time, there is much to love about the show, which was created with funds from the London 2012 Festival in tandem with Stirling’s MacRobert. The acting and design are full of wit and charm, the script makes playful switches between narration and drama, and the shifting focus from outer space to Planet Earth adds an extra layer of theatricality.

Mikey and Addie is at Eden Court, Inverness, on 25 June, and Perth Theatre on 30 June.

• Mikey and Addie
• Mark Fisher