I've always thought that a good way of judging the quality of a show is how much of its spirit accompanies you home on the Tube, swimming lazily around in your head juices and sticking with you for a while after you slam shut the front door at home.When I saw The Woman in Black for the first time (aged 12 or so), I spent a night have recurrent fear-aneurisms about vengeful spirit-bitches from the black beyond. When I saw Springsteen on his Magic tour (in a stadium, on my own. Go me), I air-guitared my way home like I was sprung from cages on Highway 9. A good show leaves ghosts of thoughts that take time to fade, like flashbulb motes flaring across your eyes.
Which brings me somewhat unceremoniously to Daniel Kitson, who has been quietly winning crowds over for years with a mix of stand-up routines and so-called story shows, which mix humour with narrative structure, recounting events from Kitson's life and stirring in immaculately worded observations on the strange irregularities of mundane life.
You might have also seen him pop up briefly on Peter Kay's Phoenix Nights series, although he later dismissed the show as "lazy and racist" (on the Phoenix Nights DVD commentary, Kay refers to Kitson only as "the bastard").
It's clear that Kitson shines brightest when telling his own tales, and 66a Church Road is a fine example. In recounting his love affair with a relatively unassuming piece of rented accommodation and his subsequent, years-long quest to purchase it from a colossal clusterfuck of a landlord, Kitson actually delivers a whole lot more.
Possibly the closest touchstone to Kitson's style is Dave Gorman's Googlewhack Adventure, but while Gorman relied on a preposterously dramatic turn of events to keep audiences rapt, Kitson shows a true flair for performance by achieving precisely the same result with considerably less pliable material.
Whether conveying the sheer joy of his favourite full English breakfast ("Nailed it! Nailed it! Nailed it!" he cries, gesticulating wildly at an imaginary plate of sausages and beans) or vividly recreating the highs and lows of his fraught flat hunt, Kitson has the audience alternating between fits of laughter and ravenous silence for a full hour and a half.
The show is broken up by musical interludes (sounded like Iron & Wine to me) over which Kitson's pre-recorded voice plays, while the man himself illustrates the scene with adorably twee home-made models, appropriately stashed away in suitcases strewn about the stage.
But what made the show great, what had me still digesting the spirit of it on the way home, was Kitson's poignant vision of home as a concept, and what that concept ought to be. It's the show's central theme, and throughout, Kitson poetically expands on the idea that home is a repository of memory and the keystone with which we reassure ourselves that those memories won't be lost, because they've seeped into the walls and floors and before we know it they're galleried all around us.
Whether we find home in a building or in the arms of a loved one, the protection of memory - the instrument we use to measure and define the meaning of our lives - is an enduring and endlessly romantic theme. That's the warm spirit of 66a Church Road, and that's what I was thinking about on the Tube home.
