Show name: Alex Kitson: Now Look Here
Performer: Alex Kitson
Date and time: 13th August, 8.45pm
Rating: ★★★★ 4/5
Reviewers: Kaitlyn Smith & Nati Ziv
Alex Kitson talks like a man who has been informed he only has an hour left to communicate every thought he has ever had.
Performing Now Look Here at 8.45pm, Kitson races onto the stage and barely seems to stop for breath for the next hour. On the night I attended, there were only a handful of empty seats, and it didn’t take long to understand why people had come to see what the Devon-born comedian had to say.
At times, Kitson reminded me of Boris Johnson if Boris Johnson spoke faster, was interesting and was actually funny. Later, after he mentioned Where’s Wally himself, I realised there was a little bit of that energy in there too.
The official Fringe listing says the show is about attention, which feels particularly fitting for an hour that demands quite a lot of yours. (Edinburgh Festival Fringe) Kitson bounces between subjects at an almost ridiculous pace, moving through his childhood, his mum, politics, AI, self-driving cars, the army and his fear of his own dreams, among countless other thoughts and observations.
At one point, he talks about quitting his job after seeing so many adverts for the army. Moments later, we’re somewhere completely different. He casually mentions having studied politics at university, which suddenly makes quite a lot of sense.
There’s no crowd work to fall back on here. Instead, Kitson creates the feeling that he is genuinely just talking to you, except his brain appears to have approximately 700 things it would like to discuss before the hour is over.
That conversational quality was something both For The Plot reviewers picked up on when seeing the show separately. Nati described Now Look Here as having the same feeling as “going for a pint with the funniest friend you have”, with Kitson jumping unpredictably from life coaches to newspapers to horses and leaving you wondering what on earth he is going to say next.
His speed, however, is both one of the show’s defining qualities and its biggest weakness.
I’m someone who understands the urge to over-explain, fill every silence and get the next thought out before the previous one has even finished, so there was something strangely familiar about watching Kitson perform. But even I found myself wanting him to slow down.
About 45 minutes into the show, I noticed what felt like the first actual silence of the entire performance. It lasted approximately two seconds.
There are plenty of good jokes, but Kitson can move onto his next thought so quickly that he doesn’t always give the previous punchline enough time to land. On my night, that meant he wasn’t consistently getting the huge belly laughs his material could probably produce if it were given a little more room to breathe.
Interestingly, Nati had a slightly different experience at her performance, where some of his stories did produce belly laughs throughout the room. Yet she independently picked up on exactly the same issue with his pace, finding that he occasionally spoke so quickly that it became difficult to catch what he was saying.
That difference between the two performances perhaps says quite a lot about Now Look Here. Kitson has an enormous amount of material, natural charm and a brain seemingly determined to fire in every possible direction. When the combination works, it really works. Giving the strongest jokes an extra second to breathe could make them hit even harder.
Nati also noted that some of the material felt more adult than the advertised age guidance might suggest, something worth bearing in mind for anyone considering bringing younger teenagers.
What both performances had in common was Kitson himself. He is down-to-earth, unpredictable and naturally funny, with the kind of conversational delivery that makes a structured stand-up show feel remarkably unstructured. There’s an authenticity to the chaos that would be difficult to manufacture.
Now Look Here is an hour containing an almost absurd number of thoughts, stories, tangents and jokes. Kitson may occasionally need to give both himself and his audience permission to breathe, but you certainly can’t accuse him of leaving you without enough to think about.
★★★★
