The Interminable Suicide of Gregory Church
****
East 10th
***
Traverse

Edinburgh Theatre: If you are the embarrassingly talented Daniel Kitson, there’s only one way to follow a show that was the toast of the 2008 Fringe. This is, of course, to produce another outstanding solo work, whose imagination and linguistic inventiveness should make all notional rival pieces blush with shame before scurrying home for extensive rewriting.

Kitson, the reluctant stand-up who won the Perrier Award but shunned the comedy big-time, is a hugely engaging performer, skilled at mesmerising an audience by balancing light and more sombre sections of narrative. He starts with a delightfully witty account of his house-hunting before segueing into a story so captivating, heartening and poignant we entirely forget where reality ends and fiction begins.

In a Yorkshire loft, Kitson tells us, he came across a suicide note from one Gregory Church. More letters — 30,659, to be exact — are uncovered, as Church proceeds to live for 24 years after announcing his intention to die. The reason? Some of those, none of them loved ones, to whom this lonely man writes his final missives reply, which necessitates further correspondence.

These unlikely postal friendships spin, first tentatively and then with growing vigour, across the months and years. So gripping is the journey Kitson takes us on that when he announces the death of one of Church’s pen friends, we feel suddenly bereft. Oustanding.

East 10th Street is a beguiling oddity from cult New York performance artist Edgar Oliver. The evocative sub-title is Self Portrait with Empty House, and Oliver, complete with otherworldly southern Gothic accent, proceeds to recount how, one by one, the deeply peculiar fellow lodgers in his boarding house go so bonkers they have to be “carted off”. The “midget Cabalist”, among others, ensures that a trip to wash dishes can turn into a near-death experience.

Church until 30 August, East 10th until 16 August (0131 228 1404,
www.traverse.co.uk).