Daniel Kitson – 66a Church Road / Ben Moor – Not Everything Is Significant/ Lynn Ferguson – The Plan / Global Warming Is Gay
Daniel Kitson – 66a Church Road – Traverse 4 stars
Ben Moor – Not Everything Is Significant – Pleasance – 4 stars
Lynn Ferguson – The Plan – Gilded Balloon – 3 stars
Global Warming Is Gay – C – 3 stars
It’s been two years since Daniel Kitson’s last late-night theatre show at The Traverse. That one, C-90, and its predecessor, Stories For The Wobbly Hearted, were heartbreaking compendiums of small people living everyday lives who may or may not meet, fall in love and live happy ever after. 66a Church Road is different in that Kitson is no longer just a narrator doing a Jackanory routine for the lovelorn, but is the show’s main character as well.
Subtitled A Lament, Made of Memories and Kept in Suitcases, it’s yet another love story, only with the messy, not-quite-right flat in Crystal Palace Kitson lived in for six years. Seated among the said array of suitcases on a homely rug, he maps out a tug of love between himself, his landlord and all the emotional fixtures and fittings in-between. Punctuating each scene are recorded vignettes which, unlike the frustrations of the spoken scenes, talk candidly of more intimate encounters there, from the nights in alone and with friends, to an un-named woman who once shared his bed, but who’s long gone now. As these play out, each suitcase lights up in turn to reveal an intricately crafted miniature of a life in storage.
66a Church Road is a step up from Kitson’s previous work, closer to his stand-up but without the vitriol that fuels that particular line of work. There’s a willingness here to be more vulnerable, and to lay himself bare rather just weave other peoples imaginary lives together in some third-person off-loading. As he surrounds himself with all the gathered minutiae that defines him, Kitson’s personal archive may be messy on every level, but his frankness and the dryness of his delivery is funny and sad in the way a Jarvis Cocker song is. It will be fascinating to see where – and how far – Kitson is prepared to go next.
Similar to Kitson only with less baggage and even more understated, is Ben Moor. Coelacanth, Moor’s Herald Angel winning 2005 piece of story theatre, was a charmingly wistful shaggy dog story that was both beautiful and surreal. This latest work is even better in that it’s even more beautiful and even more surreal. Moor takes as his starting point a professional footnoter who moves into a flat formerly occupied by a professional biographer. A filled-in diary for the following year and an unfinished biography of the biographer himself becomes a chronicle of a life foretold in a world where poodling is one craze along from dogging, Nike sponsors the OED and Mobius strip clubs are filled with elongated cartoon girls.
As the footnoter corrects and clarifies fact from fiction in a manner spearheaded by both Karl Marx in The Communist Manifesto and Alasdair Gray in Lanark, a parallel universe emerges that wouldn’t look out of place in Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius stories of they’d been set in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, and the presence of the JG Ballard chain of pubs is a telling detail. And it’s these small, seemingly insignificant epiphanies that matter here in a calm, unflashy but utterly evocative manner. Moor tells us of a girl who “moves like a fading continent worried about its future,” and you know exactly what he means.
But, as vividly drawn as all this is, as Moor makes clear from the title, not much of this gently mind-bending hour-long delight may actually matter in any way, shape or form. Then again, ass up the everyday to’s and fro’s of it all, and all those little footnotes add up to something a whole lot bigger, and really rather wonderful.
Beyond stout-telling per se, Lynn Ferguson’s one-woman plays prefer to give herself a character to play with. So it is with The Plan, in which she plays the Angel Of Death as an office-bound official chalking off the recently deceased which she’s informed of by phone and regular updates on radio news. Anything to fend off the mediocrity of the graveyard shift once even the Sudoko’s been killed. Which is why she ends up acting out her favourite deaths like some afterlife greatest hits, Bad Thought Syndrome and all.
Co-written with Elly Brewer, and programmed back to back with a revival of Ferguson’s previous play, Heart and Sole, The Plan is a darkly funny miniature with an unremitting sense of ennui at its heart.
Playwright Iain Heggie has given up theatre more times than Sinatra did comeback gigs. Yet in Global Warming Is Gay, here comes old bucket-mouth again with his latest opus, which sees green warrior Andy, brother of Green MSP Graham, and his girlfriend and credit card holder Kirsty shell out a fortune for trees fobbed off as a coat-stands and a log for a chaise longue. With Andy’s ex, Kirsty’s brother and a carbon footprint expert in tow, eco-consumerism turns to eco-fascism and Andy and Kirsty prove green in other ways
Of course, none of this actually has anything to do with global warming. Rather, in a sit-com style reminiscent of Alan Ayckbourn, Heggie has grabbed hold of a mess of modern mores likely to date quicker than an organic banana, and used them to tweak out the extreme ridiculousness of human behaviour as a result...
Heggie’s own production for a students and graduate based company still needs knocked into shape, though immense fun is already being had with the stream of riffs on increasingly gynaecologically challenging insults. At his best, Heggie’s heightened style can be as savage as Moliere, and one longs for a professional company to take a chance on Heggie’s adaptation of Don Juan, a taboo-busting version called The Don. Global Warming Is Gay will do for now.
The Herald, August 12th 2008
ends
Ben Moor – Not Everything Is Significant – Pleasance – 4 stars
Lynn Ferguson – The Plan – Gilded Balloon – 3 stars
Global Warming Is Gay – C – 3 stars
It’s been two years since Daniel Kitson’s last late-night theatre show at The Traverse. That one, C-90, and its predecessor, Stories For The Wobbly Hearted, were heartbreaking compendiums of small people living everyday lives who may or may not meet, fall in love and live happy ever after. 66a Church Road is different in that Kitson is no longer just a narrator doing a Jackanory routine for the lovelorn, but is the show’s main character as well.
Subtitled A Lament, Made of Memories and Kept in Suitcases, it’s yet another love story, only with the messy, not-quite-right flat in Crystal Palace Kitson lived in for six years. Seated among the said array of suitcases on a homely rug, he maps out a tug of love between himself, his landlord and all the emotional fixtures and fittings in-between. Punctuating each scene are recorded vignettes which, unlike the frustrations of the spoken scenes, talk candidly of more intimate encounters there, from the nights in alone and with friends, to an un-named woman who once shared his bed, but who’s long gone now. As these play out, each suitcase lights up in turn to reveal an intricately crafted miniature of a life in storage.
66a Church Road is a step up from Kitson’s previous work, closer to his stand-up but without the vitriol that fuels that particular line of work. There’s a willingness here to be more vulnerable, and to lay himself bare rather just weave other peoples imaginary lives together in some third-person off-loading. As he surrounds himself with all the gathered minutiae that defines him, Kitson’s personal archive may be messy on every level, but his frankness and the dryness of his delivery is funny and sad in the way a Jarvis Cocker song is. It will be fascinating to see where – and how far – Kitson is prepared to go next.
Similar to Kitson only with less baggage and even more understated, is Ben Moor. Coelacanth, Moor’s Herald Angel winning 2005 piece of story theatre, was a charmingly wistful shaggy dog story that was both beautiful and surreal. This latest work is even better in that it’s even more beautiful and even more surreal. Moor takes as his starting point a professional footnoter who moves into a flat formerly occupied by a professional biographer. A filled-in diary for the following year and an unfinished biography of the biographer himself becomes a chronicle of a life foretold in a world where poodling is one craze along from dogging, Nike sponsors the OED and Mobius strip clubs are filled with elongated cartoon girls.
As the footnoter corrects and clarifies fact from fiction in a manner spearheaded by both Karl Marx in The Communist Manifesto and Alasdair Gray in Lanark, a parallel universe emerges that wouldn’t look out of place in Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius stories of they’d been set in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, and the presence of the JG Ballard chain of pubs is a telling detail. And it’s these small, seemingly insignificant epiphanies that matter here in a calm, unflashy but utterly evocative manner. Moor tells us of a girl who “moves like a fading continent worried about its future,” and you know exactly what he means.
But, as vividly drawn as all this is, as Moor makes clear from the title, not much of this gently mind-bending hour-long delight may actually matter in any way, shape or form. Then again, ass up the everyday to’s and fro’s of it all, and all those little footnotes add up to something a whole lot bigger, and really rather wonderful.
Beyond stout-telling per se, Lynn Ferguson’s one-woman plays prefer to give herself a character to play with. So it is with The Plan, in which she plays the Angel Of Death as an office-bound official chalking off the recently deceased which she’s informed of by phone and regular updates on radio news. Anything to fend off the mediocrity of the graveyard shift once even the Sudoko’s been killed. Which is why she ends up acting out her favourite deaths like some afterlife greatest hits, Bad Thought Syndrome and all.
Co-written with Elly Brewer, and programmed back to back with a revival of Ferguson’s previous play, Heart and Sole, The Plan is a darkly funny miniature with an unremitting sense of ennui at its heart.
Playwright Iain Heggie has given up theatre more times than Sinatra did comeback gigs. Yet in Global Warming Is Gay, here comes old bucket-mouth again with his latest opus, which sees green warrior Andy, brother of Green MSP Graham, and his girlfriend and credit card holder Kirsty shell out a fortune for trees fobbed off as a coat-stands and a log for a chaise longue. With Andy’s ex, Kirsty’s brother and a carbon footprint expert in tow, eco-consumerism turns to eco-fascism and Andy and Kirsty prove green in other ways
Of course, none of this actually has anything to do with global warming. Rather, in a sit-com style reminiscent of Alan Ayckbourn, Heggie has grabbed hold of a mess of modern mores likely to date quicker than an organic banana, and used them to tweak out the extreme ridiculousness of human behaviour as a result...
Heggie’s own production for a students and graduate based company still needs knocked into shape, though immense fun is already being had with the stream of riffs on increasingly gynaecologically challenging insults. At his best, Heggie’s heightened style can be as savage as Moliere, and one longs for a professional company to take a chance on Heggie’s adaptation of Don Juan, a taboo-busting version called The Don. Global Warming Is Gay will do for now.
The Herald, August 12th 2008
ends
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