Lucinda Ding And The Monstrous Thing

Daniel Kitson has busy this festival. He’s twice performing his current tour show After The Beginning. Before The End – which involved fans queueing for the best part of an hour on Friday – is running through a a couple of work-in-progress versions of his next idea, and introduced a screening of the concert film of his tour It’s Always Right Now, Until It’s Later (but skipped a much-anticipated Q&A afterwards).

Then there was this; a late-night offering of his 45-minute ‘adventure poem’ Lucinda Ding And The Monstrous Thing, with his long-term collaborator Gavin Osborn on guitar. The Poetry Arena has surely never been more popular – especially at midnight – and for good reason: this was only the second time the verse has ever been performed, the other was at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre last year.

The epic offering could almost be a children’s poem, the odd bit of bad language aside. It certainly has a childlike ethos, as he tells of monsters, castles, derring-do, and flights through underground tunnels beneath the moorland setting. Being a son of Denby Dale himself, it’s a landscape with which he is surely very familiar.

Though not as complex and layered as his theatrical stand-up shows, the capers have a pacy, exciting narrative to drive things forward, as we learn how the young Miss Ding befriended the black creature with the red eyes, only to forsake him as she embarks on adult relationships, both toxic and decent. His writing is eloquent but simple; sometimes even gib in the rhymes. But other times he pulls of a nifty twist of language to achieve the required couplet.

Being a comic, he’s not adverse to stopping the fictional escapades to congratulate himself on a job well done in either in creation or delivery, such as getting past a segment that has previously proved troublesome. And every few minutes, Kitson’s story is given a musical counterpoint by Osborn, echoing the events just described with added melodic charm.

Although it frequently seems aimed at a younger audience – and Kitson would surely make an excellent children’s author – a more pessimistic undertone provides an element of complexity. and maturity. This is not a bedtime story for which ‘happy ever after’ is in any way a foregone conclusion.

- by Steve Bennett

Review date: 21 Jul 2013
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett