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Latitude
2010
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News
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Latitude Festival 2010 Reviews (3)It's Always Right Now, Until It's LaterDaniel Kitson Daniel Kitson looks around at the theatre tent that he's packed out at 11 o'clock on a Saturday morning, and seems nervous. This is a preview show, he explains - a scratch showing of the new show he's taking to Edinburgh this year. And given his way with a deadline, he only started writing it a few weeks ago. After more self-deprecating comments and pre-emptive apologies (especially to the parents of the children sat in the front row), he opens his laptop and starts to read us a story. And it's captivating. It's fragments of the lives of two individuals, who don't know each other but whose paths will one day cross. We follow Caroline Carpenter as her life moves forward - catching up with her at certain random moments - and we follow William Rivington's life backwards in the same way, from the point of his death back until the moment when his life and Caroline's briefly crossed. It's a quite beautiful meditation on the moments in life which define us, and how who we are is formed really by nothing but a series of incremental developments from every experience we ever have, however mundane. We glimpse William as an old man round at his friend's place, trying to watch TV and to block out the sound of said friend's grunts and groans from the toilet next door. We learn how they met, in the cemetery when visiting the graves of, respectively, father and wife. And we see Caroline as a young girl knocking her teeth out while riding down an impossibly steep hill; and then as a student meeting her future husband, who was one of the children who saw her accident as a child; and then as a new mother, struggling along the high street in the rain with her sick child, breaking down into tears and being comforted by a handful of words from a stranger. Ultimately it's about mortality, I guess; and how we deal with the thought. William has had a long obsession with a person's last words on their deathbed, and how these can sum up and define their life - a final refrain, a small message sent into the cosmos, echoing afterwards. But in practice this has meant that, as death approaches, he has had to become very careful about speaking at all, in case his last words - which he has been preparing for so long - end up being something utterly banal. There's also a nice rant about memorial plaques on park benches, which William hates - people "smearing a bench with the muck of mortality", in his view: not because the deceased genuinely loved that spot, but because they can't think what else to do to preserve their memory. These are the sort of thoughts Kitson has, and it's a real pleasure to be in the company of his inimitable mind for an hour. His warnings were needless - ok, the children mostly fell asleep, but that should be seen as testament to his soothing storytelling style. Kitson deals with tough subjects but the fact that he can do so in so sensitive, humane and funny a way, means that we come out with far more hope, not less. Corinne Salisbury
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