On the Lyceum stage not long ago, three actors looked out at the audience to perform the interlocking monologues of Brian Friel’s Faith Healer. The pleasure was in the direct address, the linguistic richness and the curious satisfaction of hearing three sides of the same story. In a scruffier kind of way, those qualities are all present tonight as Daniel Kitson shuffles on with a cheerful “Hello!” and, in the company of singer-songwriter Gavin Osborn, settles in for a long night of storytelling.
And it is very long. They first performed the three pieces in Stories for the Starlit Sky on separate nights in 2009, but for the practicalities of this tour, they’re doing the whole lot together. That’s a full four hours of listening. After the second interval (yes, there are two), the self-deprecating Kitson conducts a headcount to see who’s lasted the course.
This, he has explained, is not one of his “genre-busting comedy-theatre hybrids”, but another string to his bow. We’re in the territory of his Stories for the Wobbly Hearted, where the smallest details of everyday life take on great emotional weight and where lonely eccentrics are sometimes rewarded by love.
Reading from the Moleskine notebooks that lie at his feet, he gives us the tale of a couple employed to log every act of romantic love in a complex filing system (bureaucratic shades of his sublime C-90). Then there’s the one about a man who drives into the night in a seemingly futile attempt to return a stranger’s pen. And, in a twist worthy of Scheherazade, a story-within-a-story as a father tries to get his 10-year-old son to sleep.
Yes, perhaps it is too much of a good thing and, yes, it’s a slow burn compared with the heady intensity of his best work, but it’s no less lyrical, funny, vivid and humane.
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At Manchester Dance House on 20 and 21 October; Brighton Dome Concert Hall on 26 October. Then touring until 14 November.
