Analog.ue - Daniel Kitson, NT

Daniel Kitson's one man show involving him narrating a story into 46 parts recorded on to 46 analogue machines. these, which are  in a huge pile at the back of the stage at the beginning of the show, are one after the other distributed about the stage and connected by Kitson to the power source - just in time for the next part of the story to start. Kitson spends the near two hours running between the table of machines at the back, laying connecting cables and waiting at the central down stage power desk for the cue to flick the switch onto the next device. Kitson warns us - though his autobigraphical narration in introduction and regular occourances - also recorded, that this could go wrong. some of the machines are very old, audible in the quality of sound when they play. at times the sound starts too low or high on one device and Kitson rewinds and starts that section of the story again. its funny, I knew nearly nothing about the show beforehand, (my lovely mum booked it on a whim) and had either of us been told that we would sit in a dark warm theatre for two hours with just the narrated story by a man with an almost monotone voice i don't think i would have been enthused. well im blooming glad I didnt know that as it was beautiful. The story itself, wooven of two seperate narratives involving tape recorders and lonesome individuals - quite how Kitson paints himself is, touching, tense, elequent and funny. The stakes were high - we knew it could go wrong  at any moment - one of the machines could fail at any point. these high stakes meant we, the audience were invested in what was happening- we willed the machines to work, and when there was a wobble the tension was even audiable from the audience - like watching a tennis match. What made it really rather special was Kitson's drole tones informing us that all of these machines, would, after the few shows, be dispursed back in the multiple means that they had come to him - through ebay, gumtree, freecycle, charity shops, antique shops, markets, bootsales and house clearances. Thus the story its ints entiterity in this form is only for these few performances, experienced and still existing only in the memories of the few hundred people who went to the show. The beauty of this struck me...

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