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Sunday, August 12, 2012

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Written for Culture Wars
Daniel Kitson has done it again. What that might mean, I’ve only a second-hand inkling. Despite eight consecutive Fringes, I’ve never yet “been Kitsoned,” as he puts it in this brilliantly self-conscious corkscrew of a show. As of 1.52pm… is a picture that contains itself and continues ad infinitum.

On a stripped-back stage, Kitson sits behind a trestle table with a manila folder in front of him. There would have been more: a set – a revolving set no less – projected films and a cast of six, but he and Jen Platt only finished writing it on 1st August. Instead, he’s reading the script: stage directions, character names and all. We’ll just have to make do with imagination.

That script turns backflips with the reflexive flair of Charlie Kaufman. It has three separate layers: Daniel, to be played by Daniel Kitson, sat in an office struggling to write a play; Dan, the subject of that play, “a fictionalised version of me played by an actor who is not me,” who is struggling to write a play with his co-author Jen; and Max, the 70 year-old subject of that play, in hospital explaining his lifestyle of absolute disposability, of taking nothing with him from one day to the next, to his care-nurse Carrie. Got that? No. Well tough, Kitson’s not going to slow down, his uncompromising style is refreshingly extraordinary; he leads, entertainingly enough, that we sprint and squint to keep up. Besides, it only gets more complex.

Because Kitson – the reader – keeps popping out to offer explanatory footnotes about the story behind the story. Because Daniel’s writing Dan and Dan’s writing Daniel – like that Escher sketch of a hand drawing a hand drawing the first hand – and both are writing Max and Carrie into existence, which, in itself, has all the trappings of Kitson’s previous work: “vaguely allegorical, quasi-existential” whimsy.

“I am sick of the quiet fucking dignity of unwitnessed fucking lives,” he yells, even as he recites another such life into existence.

This total knowingness – bloated self-aggrandizing and pinpoint self-satirising – elevates As of 1.52pm... above the usual writer’s block stock. So to does it’s extraordinarily considered dramaturgy, largely smuggled in disguised as laughter lines. Daniel’s stalled writing-life, as coffee cups mount alongside frustrations and self-celebration, becomes an imagined slapstick routine, incessantly tumbling from chairs, down blackboards and out of windows. “I’ve had a fall,” runs the punchline of a writer battling to live up to his own reputation.

The question is always ‘What happens next?’ and, in Max’s core character trait, Kitson quiet probes at the idea – and impossibility of – re-invention. Max tags the things he leaves behind, but how – ponders Dan – to tag the tagging implement. How, in other words, do you start afresh without entirely disappearing? In all this, too, is the question of our complicity; Kitson sits there berating us, the fanboy audience, as an idea, yet entirely not meaning it personally. We drove him to this with our incessant demand for more of the same, our critical acclaim, our rabid ticket booking that sees his tickets hoovered up in split seconds, snorted to feed addictions.

In any other hands, this sort of hyper-reflexivity would be an indulgence at best and, more likely, an irritation. Hell, it’s an indulgence in Kitson’s hands but he’s so knowing, so withering about his own indulgences that it’s just a total, unadulterated pleasure throughout.

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