Review of the comic's latest show

Strap in. Daniel Kitson immediately warns us that Thrum will run for at least 105 minutes, straight through – well short of Ken Dodd's buttock-challenging endurance gigs, but twice as long as many comedians would perform.

But then he’s got way more than twice as many ideas as them, which he needs to stitch into this complex, dense tapestry.

Thrum is much closer to stand-up than some of his offerings, but still retains some elements of theatrical storytelling. The show starts with a flurry of ‘There is…’ statements, providing a touch of erudition and the first structural tentpole, setting up the myriad strands. He swirls around the anecdotes, expanding on one, then cutting back to another.

They mostly coagulate, eventually, around ideas surrounding the morals of intervention and the motives of good deeds. Helping the woman collapsed in a city street seems like a no-brainer. But should he call out the guy in the racist T-shirt he encounters in the aftermath of a far-right march? Remonstrate with the selfish swimming pool lane-hogger? Does he have a duty to use his platform to talk about the Palestinian genocide, as one fellow artist suggested, or would that just be virtue signalling to an already on-board crowd? Should he kick a rapist duck? Should he charge more for tickets?

That last one’s at the more solipsistic end of the scale, but allows him to indulge in the giddy superposition of self-aggrandisement and self-deprecation – both in a grey area of sincerity – that he’s made his trademark. His not-so-humble brags about being an ‘audacious genre-redefining’ artist mixed with a confession that he’s ‘taken [his] foot off the gas, creatively, five to ten years ago’ both contain a grain of truth, though Thrum is, well, thrumming with excellent ideas.

The blurb is almost a parody of Kitson’s artistic pretensions – ‘There’s the sound of somewhere else and the permanence of a plant pot and the ubiquity of a phrase and the heartbreaking brevity of a very long time,’ starts the lengthy statement. But be assured the actual show is much funnier than that makes it sound – his eloquent phrase-making in service of laughs, primarily, but sometimes poetry as well. 

He’s exacting when it comes to comedy, witheringly dismissive of his colleagues he sees more as chatty podcasters than bona fide comedians, scornful of the parasocial relationships the artform is nowadays built upon. In these 105 minutes we learn only a little bit directly about Kitson’s life – such as the small fortune he’s paying to keep the titular prop from his play Tree in storage, while racked by indecision as to its fate – and a newfound penchant for pottery.

He takes on a couple of angling-loving national treasures, too, but the real opprobrium is levelled at ordinary folk who presume wittiness by parroting others… anyone who says ‘no notes’ especially.

The contradiction that Kitson can be super-judgmental while being keen to flaunt his empathy and humanity speaks to the philosophical conundrums that underpin Thrum. Not that everything fully plugs into that, but routines such as him anthropomorphising an early-blooming daffodil are too good to resist. 

But the recurring beat behind Kitson’s entertaining, evocatively described incidents is his core philosophical question. If being kind or speaking out against the selfish and the evil is driven only by the desire to be seen to be that person, does the motive taint the action? That, but with jokes and lots of creative swearing. 

Kitson feels he may have painted himself into a corner, fearing that by shunning the mainstream – and publicity – his career is now a cycle of playing to the same people in the same sort of venues. But when the quality’s this good, it’s no wonder the audiences keep returning. And for only £15, too. He really could charge more…

• Daniel Kitson: Thrum is on tour until November 18. Daniel ​Kitson tour dates.

Review date: 29 Sep 2026
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Hornchurch Queen's Theatre