On their own

I, Claudia: 3 stars

Mussolini: 2 stars

It's Always Right Now Until It's Later: 4 stars

The title character of I, Claudia is a precocious and bolshy twelve-year-old. She’s getting over her parents’ divorce and putting on a brave face for her depressed mother. You have to infer that that’s the face she's putting on, though, because actor Kristen Thomson’s features are obscured by a mask which covers her whole face except her mouth. Each of the four characters has one of these, but only Claudia's face is so cartoonishly distorted; worse, Thomson's eyes are obscured by what look like flesh-coloured goggles, limiting her expressiveness.

She hangs out in her basement, also a haunt of the mysterious janitor, a “Bulganian" immigrant. Thomson's whole demeanour becomes slouching and secretive to capture him, but she's let down by a generic Eastern European accent. Like the other minor characters, his role is principally to provide fodder for Claudia and her imagination. Mostly, Claudia babbles, and Thomson has a good ear for teenage nonsense: “Gee, life! It’s so true sometimes, it really is." And then you catch a glimpse of serious pain through the chatter. It’s a powerful moment when Claudia's sadness is finally spelt out: was she the cause of her parents’ breakup? Was she was too ugly for her Dad to tolerate? It’s rare to see adolescent pain portrayed so clearly. 

Mussolini: A One Man Political Farce provides fascinating detail about the dictator's life but fails to provide a compelling insight into his character. Thanks to propaganda films, Mussolini must be one of the earliest historical figures we can recognise through body language, and writer-performer Ross Gurney-Randall has mastered il Duce's public posturing: head thrown back, jaw thrust forward, soaking up the crowd's applause.

Portraying the man behind the façade is harder, and Gurney-Randall's performance falls short here. The play develops in flashbacks, with the toppled dictator sorting through his belongings in his last few living hours. The contents of his suitcase—newspaper articles, photographs, a copy of Nietzsche signed by Hitler—allow Mussolini to recollect his rise and fall. Although there are some hiccups—why does Mussolini speak in estuary English while other characters have Italian accents?—he deals succinctly with the turning points in Mussolini's life. But the episodic structure frequently results in a history lesson on early Fascism. And while Gurney-Randall gives a good impression of the dictator's absurdity and arrogance, we never get a sense of his power, the menacing aura which must have surrounded him. Threatening a rival whom he would later kill, Hurney-Randall sounds more soap opera villain than a murderous tyrant.

Daniel Kitson’s stories count as theatre, but that doesn’t mean he’ll be wearing masks or dressing up as Mussolini any time soon. He writes about the ordinary moments which make up a life—two lives in this case—and he does so with a lyrical appreciation of how lives slip by. If that sounds a bit like what he did last year, that’s because he's mastered this kind of bittersweet romance. His strengths are brilliant phrase-making, a passion for revealing the transcendent in the quotidian, and occasional bursts of lewdness which bring guffaws from the Traverse crowd.

He's not resting on his laurels with It's Always Right Now, Until it's Later, though. The show has one theatrical innovation: hanging from the rafters is an orchard of light-bulbs, the bad kind, with great incandescent coils visible from the back of the theatre. Each is a moment in the life of William or Caroline, his subjects. Kitson wanders among them proprietorially, an eccentric Yorkshireman who's built something mad in his shed. As he narrates each episode the corresponding light burns brighter for a while. It’s a simple, beautiful device. It's also fortuitous, because it brings visual order to a tale which, on its second performance at least, was a little messy. The story is so ambitious—two unconnected lives which converge only for a moment—and has so much detail, so many minor characters, that occasionally Kitson seems to forget where he is. This is a beautiful, occasionally heartbreaking piece of writing, though, and there are still some tickets left. Be quick.