The Theatre Works of Comedian Daniel Kitson
Popular Stand-Up Comic's Work As A Playwright
Oct 5, 2009
When comedian Daniel Kitson won the prestigious Perrier Award at the age of 25 at the 2002 Edinburgh Fringe Festival for his stand-up comedy show Something, he returned the following year not with another stand-up show but with the first of his 'story' shows called A Made Up Story at The Pod. This was a complete departure for Kitson and received a full range of reviews from a devastating critical annihilation in The Independent to four-star raves from Chortle and others.
Stories for the Wobbly Hearted
Undeterred by the bad or the good reviews – Kitson is known to sometimes take praise worse than he takes adverse criticism – Kitson returned to Edinburgh in 2005 with Stories for the Wobbly Hearted, which premiered at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival earlier that year. This time he was performing at The Traverse, a 'real' theatre amongst all the temporary Fringe performance spaces with a reputation for high quality theatre.
Stories was a series of interwoven tales about loneliness, love and the lonely trying to find love told by Kitson sat in an armchair surrounded by 60s record players and lamps. Between his sad but funny and genuinely touching stories constructed from richly complex sentences that seemed to be daring his stammer to surface, film clips on a screen kept returning to a visual narrative of a man who repeatedly visited a petrol station to buy sandwiches because he was in love with the girl behind the counter.
C90
Wobbly Hearted also had a few dissenters in the critical ranks despite winning a Fringe First Award from The Scotsman, but his next 'story show' the following year, also at the Traverse, brought a more united positive critical reception plus another Fringe First and an award from The Stage for 'best solo show'.
C90, named after a ninety-minute audio tape, was set in an obscure department for storing home-made music compilation tapes that had for some reason never reached their intended recipient or were discarded. Henry, who works alone in the department, is on his last day, and, for the first time in his life, someone has sent him a compilation tape of his own.
Kitson tells stories of the people behind some of the thousands of cassettes on the shelves behind him – including Milly who cooks human food for the birds in her garden which becomes a hilarious running gag – until we find out about the person who sent Henry his tape.
66a Church Road
C90 toured the UK and Australia in 2007, then in 2008 Kitson returned to the Traverse with another Fringe First-winning story show, 66a Church Road.
This was a change of direction as it was a single story, not a compilation, and was more personal to him. It told the true story of a flat in London that Kitson formed a close bond with the moment he saw it and then lived in for almost six years. Kitson was surrounded by suitcases, some of which revealed illuminated models that illustrated little side stories in voice-overs between sections of the main story.
The Interminable Suicide of Gregory Church
In 2009, Kitson returned to fiction but again stuck to a single story, this time delivered more like an anecdote to a friend than a story to an audience. Again, Kitson won a Fringe First.
This show begins again with Kitson looking for somewhere to live, this time in the Yorkshire countryside. In one house after managing to get the annoying estate agent to divert from his prepared script and let him look in the loft, he found boxes containing thousands of letters written from or to the house's previous owner, Gregory Church.
Kitson doesn't buy the house but keeps the letters, spending the next few months obsessively recreating the last few years of Gregory Church's life. The correspondence began with twenty-four suicide notes to different people, but before Church had managed to write to everyone he wanted to he began to receive replies which also needed to be dealt with before he could die. This went on for several years.
Although based around a fictional character, Kitson's story is actually of his own investigations into Church's life, and so he, not Church, is the central character.
Regent's Park Shows With Gavin Osborn
Alongside his story shows, Kitson still performed a stand-up show every year at Edinburgh and elsewhere. He also created story shows for Regent's Park Open Air Theatre with musician Gavin Osborn, some of which have yet to find a wider audience.
In 2006, Kitson and Osborn took Stories for the Wobbly Hearted to Regent's Park; Osborn created the music for the original show. This was followed up in 2007 with The Ballad of Roger and Grace, which was taken to the Melbourne International Arts Festival in 2008.
The 2008 Regent's Park show was The Revenge of Heckmondwyke, which has yet to be taken anywhere else, as has the 2009 series of three interlinked tales Stories for the Starlit Sky.
Writing the Shows
Kitson appeared on a playwrights' panel at the Traverse during the 2009 Edinburgh Fringe and he revealed the major differences between writing his stand-up act and his story shows.
The stand-up comedy is written over two months of previews, testing and improvising ideas in front of an audience until he has enough material that works to make into a show. The story shows are written in isolation by sitting in front of a computer and typing out a script, which he then learns.
Kitson always performs his own work and has said he wouldn't like anyone else to perform it, but feels himself fortunate in that he doesn't have to persuade anyone else to produce it like most playwrights and now has enough of a following to guarantee an audience.
As the producer, writer, director and performer of his work, Kitson has sole responsibility for creating his shows and getting them produced, but as there is no one else involved, in his words, "I get all the sweet, sweet cash."
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