‘I have a house with lots of things in it,” says Daniel Kitson, “and this is a show about those things.” Or is it? We’re used to Kitson’s shows not being what they seem, and I don’t just mean the usual slippage between standup, storytelling and solo theatre. So it is with Keep, which threatens to be a recited list of Kitson’s 20,000 possessions, then breaks down into – well, what exactly? Something’s gone wrong with his index cards – accident or sabotage? – and proceedings are derailed. We’re left with some standup about Kitson’s hoarding habit, and an interminable wait for the explanation behind his mixed-up inventory.
The longer we wait, the more dismaying is Kitson’s misstep with this show – which recalls the one he made about his previous house, 66a Church Road, a decade ago. At 2hrs 10mins, it is far too long, and most of the final hour treads water. The premises – that he has really undertaken this inventory, and that the show then goes wrong – are not convincing. We can see a big reveal coming from miles away, but Kitson defers it protractedly. When it finally arrives, it is neither clear nor climactic.
That’s frustrating, and a big shame, because his pledge to perform the entire catalogue gets things off to a teasing start and, as ever, Kitson is a lovely performer, dispensing apercus and pearls of bittersweet wisdom that other comics would die for. Witness the gag about the shelf-life of postcards, or the idea that feelings might register in body parts other than the gut. And there is deep thinking at play about why we keep things and how they affect the stories we tell about ourselves.
But it gets muddied by Keep’s conclusion, the significance of which is lost on me. Earlier, Kitson proposes the show as an act of radical honesty, revealing himself warts-and-all through his every possession. The twist, perhaps, argues that we should never take such performative honesty on trust. But it doesn’t register, so attenuated is the concept by that stage, reduced, finally, to an enervating succession of jokes about some stuff Kitson has in his house.
At Battersea Arts Centre, London, until 31 January.
