Daniel Kitson, the British stand-up comedian and monologist, opened a recent performance of his latest show Keep on a defensive note.

“It’s not shit! Despite what you may have heard,” he said, offering a brief preamble explaining the one-man show’s ostensible premise and apologizing for the boredom it might cause during its U.S. premiere run at Studio Theatre.

Was this introduction part of the performance? Kitson insisted that it wasn’t, and he returned backstage for a 90-second break before starting the show proper. Fittingly, though, the subsequent intermission-free two hours seemed to assert that what’s said onstage often can’t be trusted.

The experience of watching Keep is one of being perpetually a little off-balance. To that end, revealing what it’s about might be a betrayal.

In the preamble, Kitson said the show would consist of him reading aloud an exhaustive list of all 20,000 items in his London house. The only set dressing is a plain brown table, a single chair, and a tall chest whose drawers contain hundreds of index cards—one per household item, down to each individual brick.

Suffice it to say that Kitson doesn’t exactly stick to the plan. His strenuous efforts to do so might persuade you that the performance you’re seeing represents the first time the plan has gone astray. That seems unlikely—but Kitson’s stream-of-consciousness delivery and improvised interactions with the crowd provide a convincing illusion.

Strap in for a poignant meditation on the memories contained within household objects, a self-lacerating portrayal of a man descending into a morass of vanity, and a brutally funny examination of human foibles and hypocrisy. You’ll think twice the next time you think about starting a sentence with “To be fair to me…”

But also strap in for… a deconstruction of everything that came before? An acknowledgment that onstage performance is an unavoidably artificial act? A frustrating work of profound, self-aware narcissism?

The design of Keep, such as it is, leaves those questions unanswered. Kitson gives viewers plenty of self-deprecating observations and eccentric British-isms to absorb, even as he’s occasionally punishing them for how they do it. Nothing escapes Kitson’s attention to his surroundings—not sirens outside the theater, crinkling ice in a cup, an audience member stifling a yawn with a labored chuckle. “I’m problematically present,” he declares at one point, an acknowledgment, if not quite an apology.

To some, Kitson’s candor in shattering the fourth wall might be admirable; others might find it grating. The show’s grasp near the end for jagged sentiment feels both probing and cloying. The tedium built into the endeavor will captive some and bore others.

Perhaps that’s all part of it, too.

Keep runs at Studio Theatre through Dec. 1. Tickets $20-25. Runtime approximately two hours and ten minutes with no intermission.