C-90

Daniel Kitson is a strange chap: when he does stand-up, he has a mouth even fouler than Roy 'Chubby' Brown's, but his 'story shows' are much gentler. C-90 was a hot ticket at Edinburgh last year - I nearly saw it, but when we turned up at the Traverse, the tickets were for another night! BBC Southern Counties radio very kindly got me a comp to review the 'reconceived' show in the Argus Basement last night. First shock was that we'd be sitting on the floor, albeit on carpet! Those that had read the Argus preview brought cushions. The 'installation' where the action took place was a 'room' lined with shelves full of cassettes and we entered through a wardrobe! After a young lady usher had warned us to go to the toilet now and walked DK's route though the limbs of the audience, the scruffy Yorkshireman arrived and launched into his story of Henry, the custodian of a mysterious collection of lost compilation tapes, a bit like the photo library in Stephen Poliakoff's TV play Shooting the past. The delivery was punctuated by tales of other sad and lonely village characters: a lollipop lady Milly (as in humiliation), a vet, a librarian. Henry was a 'chronicler of hope', cataloguing the audio cassettes meticulously (a whole section was marked 'Sorry'), but oddly he'd never listened to any of his exhibits. Then today, two parcels had arrived: one with a tape, the other with a player. He was determined to discover who sent them dot dot dot. DK's love of long words reminded me more of Les Dawson than Under Milk Wood, but he's much more animated, moving around and talking at high speed. The tales were quite sweet and endearing (I only counted two fucks and a shit the whole evening!) - so I wondered if the audience of mostly Sussex ladies could take 75 minutes of his stand up? No bar, by the way.