Edinburgh Festival: Daniel Kitson's Mouse - The Persistence of an Unlikely Thought, Traverse Theatre, review: 'Magnetic'

A piece of theatre which could be performed by anyone else, and yet only Kitson can truly fill it with purpose

Daniel Kitson's Mouse: The Persistence of an Unlikely Thought at Edinburgh Festival Fringe (Gavin Obsborn)

Late at night the great green walls of a warehouse slam shut, forming a space which we feel as boxed into as the lead and (sort of) only character. Daniel Kitson is William Booth, a writer, who uses this featureless industrial space – although he’s personalised it with a few pot plants and the like – as his place of work. For years now, he's been fine-tuning a story about a woman who imagines herself as communicating with the mouse in her house, eventually deciding to release it from its sadness by driving it one night to the park where she took all its friends when her humane traps did their work.

William is finished working, on his way out of the door laden with heavy bags, when he’s called back in by a ringing phone. It’s a wrong number, although the voice on the other end starts asking questions anyway; genial, friendly ones, which William answers hesitantly. They bounce back and forth, initially with the forced pleasantry of men who call each other ‘mate’ as punctuation, and eventually a deeper connection and a curiously shared experience emerges.

As a feted stand-up comedian turned truly singular theatrical voice, Kitson’s one-man plays are generally the event of the Traverse’s Edinburgh Festival programme. They sell out swiftly and are hotly-contested returns-queue waits, and it’s easy to see why his following is so obsessive. As a writer and director he’s perfectly attuned to the uncomfortable mannerisms of communication with strangers, of breaking down the walls of resistance to shared experience which his characters have built; and as a stand-up he maintains a personal power, on occasion breaking with the performance to commentate upon it for his audience. Even, on this occasion, berating an audience member for glancing at the time on their phone.

Some may argue that a piece in which so little essentially happens is overlong at one hundred minutes, that there’s a certain sense of repetition which might have been pared down without harming the work. I guess that depends on the viewer’s taste for Kitson, because the Godot-ish seeming simplicity of the piece is defined by his personality, by his magnetic blend of discomfort with and dismay at the world around him. It’s a piece of theatre which could be performed by anyone else, and yet only Kitson can truly fill it with purpose.

Until Sunday 28 August www.traverse.co.uk