“I may wear a costume and there might be snow in it.” Daniel Kitson gave little away at the announcement of his first Christmas show. He didn’t have to: tickets sold out in a trice, as Kitson’s always do. The man claimed to be surprisedto be making a seasonal entertainment after years of corporate-comedy bookings had watered down his festive spirit. But to the rest of us, Kitson + Christmas makes perfect sense. This standup-cum-solo theatre-maker is our preeminent storyteller – an art form with Christmas overtones. His work is also unapologetically sentimental, and who, bar the severest bah-humbugger, isn’t up for dewy eyes at Christmas time?
That’s exactly what his Show for Christmas delivers - brilliantly, sans schmaltz, with big laughs and a thoughtful, heartful engagement with what Christmas is about. You have to doff your Santa hat to the skill, sensitivity and judgment with which this story is put together. And to Kitson’s gimlet eye for the minutiae of how people speak and behave, which he fashions here into one glittering bauble after another of dialogue, character sketch, or turn of phrase.
Even by his own standards, it’s theatrically simple. There’s a prologue, in which Polly, 39, has trouble hiring a car on Christmas Eve for the long drive back to mum’s house. While he narrates it, Kitson rearranges Christmas trees around the stage, changes into formal storytelling-wear – and pops on a bobble hat. Thereafter, it’s just a man at a desk, reading a story from a red jotter. It’s about Polly’s journey, the old man she collides with on the way, and the friendship they strike up when snowbound until Boxing Day in her midsize mobile home.
Given that there’ll surely be a second life for the show, I’ll keep its secrets. Suffice to say, Polly’s foul-mouthed new friend, Nicholas, is just who she needs to meet at this crisis point in her life – a measure of which we get via answerphone messages she’s recently left for her mum (voiced by Isy Suttie), which punctuate the show.
Other than that, it’s just Kitson’s bespoke brand of standup-meets-raconteurship, whereby most characters talk like Daniel Kitson, and are apt to digress into comical rants about (for example) the dog owners who claim to be “parents” to their pets. But people do that in real life, too, and it usually gets edited out of stories, or drama. Kitson has a finely tuned ear for these bits of unserious business that animate our lives, as when Polly and Nicholas drunkenly bellow the word “tradition” at each other in funny voices for minutes on end.
Tradition is Kitson’s subject here: how our Christmases are in hock to it, which misses the point of the wonder, the sense of possibility it signified for us when we were young. (As Polly says: “Oh, I couldn’t do something different. It wouldn’t be the same.”) There are rhapsodic expressions of this romantic sensibility, then promptly undercut by swearing or moments of low comedy – as when the old man, after delivering a eulogy to the pair’s uniquely positioned Christmas tree, chokes on his own spit.
There’s more: tender insights into how bereavement feels, say, or what it might be like to be Santa, decades-behind on answering all those letters, turning up to funerals with train sets for the deceased. The conclusion is lovely, too: its combination of magic, catharsis and sentimentality is pitched perfectly, without overpromising happy endings or undermining the emotional realities of what’s gone before. After only a week’s run, Kitson’s Christmas show is over almost as soon as it began. But its story is for the ages.
