In recent plays, Daniel Kitson has been pre-occupied with electronic gadgets, which made it seem reasonable to suppose that this one would have something to do with a small object that sits alongside a computer. Not so. We are dealing eith a living, furry creature with a fondness for Toblerone and an ability to communicate eith humans.
William (Kitson) rents a storage unit in which he has spent 12 years writing a story about a lonely woman and the aforementioned mouse. One evening he receives a telephone call in the unit, a wrong number, and to reveal too much of the conversation that follows would be a spoiler. Suffice to say that the play, a mix of comedy, pathos and the supernatural, consists of that conversation with an unseen voice, intercut with Kitson himself telling us about William – he forgot his lines quite a lot at this performance, but he probably does it deliberately.
Kitson as writer and performer is in top form – totally unpredictable, hilarious, moving and perceptive. The material is complex, often making the trivial seem profound, in places like the work of a philosopher. On the other hand, a lot of the fun comes from the niggling suspicion that it could all be utter rubbish. This mouse roars!
Performance date: 7 August 2016
The Beast's Pen 