Daniel Kitson: Thrum

Daniel Kitson has never been particularly interested in making comedy easy. For more than two decades, the Edinburgh Comedy Award winner has pursued his own peculiar path through stand-up, storytelling and theatre, creating shows in which apparently inconsequential observations can gradually acquire surprising emotional and philosophical weight. Thrum, his latest work, promises to be no exception.

The show's starting point is an apparently chaotic collection of thoughts: figs and worms, an old dog refusing a blanket, a woman on a train wearing a badge, a smoke alarm, a daffodil flowering in December, a tree stored on a farm in Kent, the smell of tobacco and the far end of a platform at Tamworth station. There are hotel rooms, toilets in Hong Kong, coffee shops in Melbourne and thoughts about rotting, responsibility, resistance to growth and the passage of time. Kitson describes it, rather wonderfully, as a new comedy show containing…