As humanity faces a bleak and uncertain future, performance poet Ross Sutherland believes he has found a folk hero who can keep us on the straight and narrow over the coming decades – Pac-man.

His show, which brings together the kind of computer graphics that looked blisteringly futuristic in 1983 with stand-up elements and his own surreal performance pieces, was conceived when Ross found himself sharing an office with staff at the Daily Mail in a previous job.

“Listening in to a lot of their conversations, it occurred to me that our national press were doom-mongering about the future and not talking about the present,” he says.

“If we believe the news, then Britain will be this lawless, poxed wasteland, and I started thinking about our hapless acceptance that things are always going to get worse, and about the kind of fairy-tale characters that would survive the centuries and impart knowledge to people of the future.”

If this seems like a peculiar train of thought to you, then the destination may be even more baffling.

“Pac-Man is a tragic hero character, but I also talk a lot about my old schoolmate Gavin, who I think could well be this century’s spiritual leader.”

Aware that some people are put off by performance poetry in its purest form, Sutherland has introduced different elements to his work over the years, including still images, animations and the kind of structured banter more redolent of stand-up than a poetry reading.

“A lot of that comes out of when I first became a poet and I was trying to sell it to audiences. People can be a bit skeptical, and so it became poetry by stealth, where you have all these animations and stuff and then you suddenly run out of the dark shouting this poem at them. There’s nothing they can do – it’s too late, it’s sunk in.”

At 29, Sutherland believes that his is the first generation who has not known a world without video games. As part of the first generation of people to also be old enough to experience nostalgia about them, he says the simpler days of gaming has informed much of his work.

“I think a lot of those early games were about distilling the world into something very straightforward – they’re all about mapping a boundary or defending an area, very simple things.

“The only thing about them was that it was such a let-down after you’ve seen the box. You look at the picture on the box and there’s this 20ft, armour-plated soldier with a smouldering asteroid in his hand, and you’re like ‘f****** awesome’. Then you get in, and the guy’s five pixels high and the game crashes all the time.”

Sutherland’s divergent interest in all things electronic and the written word led him to put together a thesis on computer- generated poetry at university.

“I took famous poems and line by line put them into translation programs and then translated them back. The idea was that the computer is being forced to take the poem and interpret it, collapse all the ambiguity and spew it out the back again.

“There were lovely little phrases. I took the Lord’s Prayer and ‘deliver us from evil’ became ‘put us on diabolic transport’. I’ve even gone down to a few open mic nights and read them out.”

  • Starts 4.30pm, tickets £5. Call 01273 709709.