ADMIT it. We have all done it: made up a selection of favourite songs on a cassette and sent it to a loved one. What happens to all those tokens of love, requited or otherwise? Where is the great compilation tape bin in the sky?
Daniel Kitson knows. His one-man play is the story of the last day’s work of the man who has catalogued and shelved them all. His work is now done because these days, obviously, you swap tracks on your iPod.
The story is told in the very office where it took place, backed by a wall of those self-same cassettes, each carefully labelled. Why the narrator knows the details of Henry Leonard Bodie’s last day is never explained. Perhaps Kitson, ever the geeky loner — intense, intelligent but apparently locked inside his own world — is his own protagonist.
If you thought the character in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity was a bit obsessive, forever rearranging his LPs and trying to track down old girlfriends, Henry is on a whole new level. He does not even listen to the music until, on the last day, a compilation tape arrives addressed to him.
Advertisement
Who sent it and why occupies much of the extraordinary narrative, which encompasses Milly, the lollipop lady in the village, the much-loved primary school teacher going off on maternity leave, and others who get brief mentions.
Kitson is a phenomenon. Having carved out a niche as the comedian’s comedian, always working alone, this is his second “legit” play.
C-90 is more ambitious than last year’s effort. Instead of a series of vignettes, he winds the separate lives of Henry and the lollipop lady (the woman who puts the Milly in “humiliation” — a typical Kitson line with its mixture of clever, unexpected wordplay and a hint of bitterness) closer and closer together in the course of 80 minutes.
With his deadpan delivery and delight in the minutiae of daily life, Kitson might almost be a latter-day Alan Bennett, except that it would have to be a Bennett on a highly refined chemical stimulant, because Kitson gets at least five words in where Bennett would still be drawing out the first one.
For all its lack of conventional performance values and the studied dullness of its characters, C-90 manages to be both funny and humane. Daniel Kitson is, quite simply, a remarkably gifted writer.
Advertisement
Box office 0131-228 1404
EDINBURGH FESTIVAL ONLINE
Advertisement
For all the latest on the Edinburgh Festival click here
What the experts say — for instant opinions visit the Critics Blog here.