9/6/10, New Players Theatre
Daniel Kitson's latest theatrical monologue. A disappointment after The Interminable Suicide of Gregory Church, which we saw in Edinburgh.
Maybe that was simply a better piece (A's daughter Jo's boyfriend Steve says he thinks 66a Church Road was written earlier). Maybe Kitson's peculiar combination of story-telling whimsy and sophisticated jokes works well the first time you hear it, but seems self-indulgent, sentimental and really a bit boring second time around. Maybe the venue was wrong: the New Players is a long thin hall in which Kitson on stage seemed a long way away and his props (miniature models in a succession of battered old suitcases) were barely visible, whereas we were much closer and on three sides of him at the Traverse. Maybe it was too long and repetitive: at 40 minutes it might have been just right. Maybe there weren't enough jokes. Maybe he needs a director to collaborate with and reign him in. Maybe Gregory Church was better because it was an invented narrative in which Kitson as narrator played only walk-on parts, whereas Church Road is largely about him and, while there are plenty of wry smiles of recognition in his account of himself, he's just not interesting enough. Maybe it was all of the above.
Stage littered with suitcases. Kitson comes on and tells us the story of his infatuation with his old flat in Crystal Palace in which he lived for six years, which sounds pretty ordinary but which had lots of original features like sash windows and fireplaces and which to him was home, which he tried and failed to buy from his landlord several times, and which he eventually left two and a half years ago. Interspersed with blacked-out sequences of recorded voice-over which apparently related some of the things that happened to him in the flat, including a relationship with a woman who is otherwise never alluded to.
It's about what "home" means, and about nostalgia, he tells us at the beginning, which isn't some cosy dewy-eyed emotion but means in the original Greek fear of losing a place.
Moments of cleverness but generally dull.
Nothing quite as witty as his ad lib demolition at the end (he stutters badly when he's not got a script) of those people who chose to walk out in the middle to get more drinks.
Showing posts with label daniel kitson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label daniel kitson. Show all posts
Thursday, 10 June 2010
Wednesday, 19 August 2009
DANIEL KITSON: THE INTERMINABLE SUICIDE OF GREGORY CHURCH
18/8/09, Traverse (Edinburgh Fringe)
A raves about Kitson and insisted we see him. D's colleagues rave about him. I'd never heard of him.
We couldn't get tickets for his sell-out stand-up gig, so made do with this instead. S called it "a shaggy dog story" and didn't much care for it. D said she fell asleep (something to do with the red wine and the lateness of the hour, perhaps?). The man next to me was twitching (not enough jokes?). A raved.
He's a shaggy dog of a man, a balding beardy in a baggy jumper (which he removed as it grew warmer, carefully untucking his shirt as he did so). He does a very nice line in highly articulate self-deprecation. It's very engaging. He's geeky, slightly pompous, erudite, loves words and uses all those things to considerable comic effect. I'd love to see him do straight stand-up. I assume he's doing Gregory Church because he's mastered stand-up and this is a new challenge, something to stop him getting bored.
I'm not sure it worked though it was never less than intriguing. The story, such as it was involved a cache of some 30,000 letters written over more than 20 years to and from a man called Gregory Church, evidently Kitson without the sense of humour. He started friendless and suicidal and ended with this vast collection of letters full of words like "badinage" and "bombast", exchanged with a collection of similar misfits and no-hopers... and with a woman called Isabelle, to whom he sent thousands of letters but who never once replied.
Kitson read verbatim extracts from a little black notebook, and suitably pompous and self-important they sounded, but also wry and occasionally witty (a bit like Kitson...)
K began by telling us that everything we were going to hear was made up, except for the first bit. He then described house-hunting in West Yorkshire where he'd been brought up (plausible) with an estate agent called Mike (still plausible) and finding a house with a loft where he'd been told there was no loft (again plausible) and being told by Mike, when confronted with the evidence of a loft hatch, that it was a fake loft (OK, no longer plausible). But just where did the "real" story end and the fictional narrative begin?
A work of post-modern fiction dressed up as late-night fringe comedy. Clever, that.
Alastair McGowan was in the audience: A had no idea who he was.
A raves about Kitson and insisted we see him. D's colleagues rave about him. I'd never heard of him.
We couldn't get tickets for his sell-out stand-up gig, so made do with this instead. S called it "a shaggy dog story" and didn't much care for it. D said she fell asleep (something to do with the red wine and the lateness of the hour, perhaps?). The man next to me was twitching (not enough jokes?). A raved.
He's a shaggy dog of a man, a balding beardy in a baggy jumper (which he removed as it grew warmer, carefully untucking his shirt as he did so). He does a very nice line in highly articulate self-deprecation. It's very engaging. He's geeky, slightly pompous, erudite, loves words and uses all those things to considerable comic effect. I'd love to see him do straight stand-up. I assume he's doing Gregory Church because he's mastered stand-up and this is a new challenge, something to stop him getting bored.
I'm not sure it worked though it was never less than intriguing. The story, such as it was involved a cache of some 30,000 letters written over more than 20 years to and from a man called Gregory Church, evidently Kitson without the sense of humour. He started friendless and suicidal and ended with this vast collection of letters full of words like "badinage" and "bombast", exchanged with a collection of similar misfits and no-hopers... and with a woman called Isabelle, to whom he sent thousands of letters but who never once replied.
Kitson read verbatim extracts from a little black notebook, and suitably pompous and self-important they sounded, but also wry and occasionally witty (a bit like Kitson...)
K began by telling us that everything we were going to hear was made up, except for the first bit. He then described house-hunting in West Yorkshire where he'd been brought up (plausible) with an estate agent called Mike (still plausible) and finding a house with a loft where he'd been told there was no loft (again plausible) and being told by Mike, when confronted with the evidence of a loft hatch, that it was a fake loft (OK, no longer plausible). But just where did the "real" story end and the fictional narrative begin?
A work of post-modern fiction dressed up as late-night fringe comedy. Clever, that.
Alastair McGowan was in the audience: A had no idea who he was.
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