ANTHONY
MENCHETTI The man from down under makes wrongs
right 0000
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I
NINA CONTI & MICKY
FLANAGAN
You. me and monkey makes three 000.
NICK BALL A load of old balls 0.
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This posh twat bequeaths a class act
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DOMINIC FRISBY Needs to plough in richer material 00
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Daniel, sans stand-up
DANIEL KITSON Bathos by the bucketload. barely comedy. and simply wonderful 0...
Daniel Kitson should make a bonfire. Not so he can burn the mediocre reviews he has received for this year's show but so he could do A Made Up Story justice. A photo album and a bottle of Thunderbird might help - either way it would be an experience that those sitting on the edge of the hissing embers would never forget. Instead, we are sitting in an oven tent on Lothian Road with all its attendant traffic noise. Half the audience is made up of merry gangs of lads hoping to be entertained. The other half knows that, chances are, these young men will slouch deep in their plastic chairs. solipsistic and strangely melancholic within ten minutes of the show beginning, for Kitson barely registers as the man he once was. Change. dissemination and deconstruction of the comic form are his games now.
A Made Up Story is a winding monologue about three outsiders: Dora, Beth and AI. Dora is a young, naive thing who can't seem to relate to the outside world. Beth is a man and clearly based on Kitson himself and Al has tried, and failed. to commit suicide. The story is provincial and small, bound by a North West of England misanthropy. By turns Kitson reminds you of Ronnie Corbett, Peter Kay, even Eric Morecambe. but his timing is too skewed; his sense of the sweetness and violence of the world too bombastic to really be compared to anyone. What Kitson seems to be working us through is his own flaccid therapy session: ideas of depression, surrealism, mundanity and otherness surface all to often. He cremates his own past persona with touches of Asperger's Syndrome and cheap bathos. It shouldn‘t really work but it does. His blunt-ended act is so macabre, but childlike. it exudes a deeply touching kind of urban magic realism along with a sense that we should all be beware of this talent. In the words of Morrissey, the man ‘bears more grudges than lonely high court judges‘. (Paul Dale)
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magazine
- THE LIST FESTIVAL GUIDE 29