John Kearns: Tilting at Windmills review – a little dust (and prawn cocktail crisps) in a riff on TS Eliot | Funny

HHow did it get to this point? That’s what a new program called Tilting at Windmills finds John Kearns to ask, and – after a fashion – that’s what TS Eliot asked The Waste Landmodern poetry Kearns uses here as an unexpected method. After the end of a 12-year relationship with the mother of his son, we find the 39-year-old angrier than usual, and less stuck: a hopeless hunt living at home with mom and dad, wandering the streets of south London after escaping a depressing trip inspired by Eliot’s verse.

Audio clips of the poem, read by Alec Guinness, underpin the show. They enter it (like Van Gogh’s Starry Night did instead, The Varnishing Days) as well as fear, unspeakable secrets of life, and people – on the difference between the high quality of literature and the real life experiences of the recipient. Here she is shopping at Aldi with her mother; there she is, naked and not very wet under the dripping shower. A comment about a washing machine by a newspaper reporter creates anxiety; The difficult youth meeting is remembered by Prime Minister Tony Blair, who came to see Kearns play at the school.

Directed by Jon Brittain, all of this comes to us in similar pieces of Eliot, while Kearns jumps between simulations (meet the ventriloquist). Nina Conti he wonders “am I my own doll?!”) and is saddened by the destruction of his domestic dream. We are not allowed deep into it all: there is no one to share it with. But if his true feelings are woven carelessly into the art of Streatham clown adrift, it still makes sense, especially in the strange anger he often brings to his conversations with the dimwit estate agent Connor, say, or with two poets in the museum above a forbidden packet of praswn.

Perhaps at the edge, the real hurt beneath Kearns’ (very funny) less commercial appeals, hinders the fun. But there’s no denying the care, skill and many well-translated words of a comedian who “feels like he’s being CC’ed in his life”. At its best, this show about The Waste Land itself wants to do wonderstruck, workaday poetry.