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Much A-Stew About NothingMuch a-Stew About Nothing, Brighton Dome ★★★★

The comedian toys, teases mocks and plays as he works through his carefully convoluted and playfully abrasive ideas

By Dominic Maxwell in The Times Posted on Monday, September 23rd, 2013

Stewart Lee is one of comedy’s big success stories. No, he’s not filling the arenas like McIntyre, Bishop or Flanagan, and his BBC Two stand-up series is aimed at a niche audience: those of us who are happy to hang on as he works through his carefully convoluted and playfully abrasive ideas, basting his dry routines with reminders that they are routines, that comedy is a contrivance.

Yet in standing his ground and finding his crowd over the nine years since his breakthrough stand-up set – his first after co-creating Jerry Springer: The Opera, which followed his years in a double act with Richard Herring – he has made himself the 21st -century’s poster boy for the art form formerly known as alternative comedy.

It runs in the family; his wife, Bridget Christie, has just won the Foster’s Edinburgh Comedy Awards. And her old man’s new show, Much A-Stew About Nothing, is his funniest and most focused for a while.

That’s partly because, as he keeps reminding us, the evening’s three half-hour routines are destined for his third television series next year. He makes it clear that this show will be a fragmented, no-frills show – “Anyway, that’s the end,” is his final line – after noting that this, the second date to go on sale at this 1,700 seater is not quite full. “You’re the people that applied late for tickets…I’m glad you came, but you’re not really my crowd.”

Ah, irony. We all like to think we can handle it. Only a few of us can do so without it farting in our faces. Lee is an irony grandmaster. He has made sure to write plenty of cherishable lines. He’s also sidelined the obsession with analysing his position in the market placethat was making his act eat it’s own tail. And as he works through a routine about Tories, one about Englishness and multiculturism, and a wickedly morose finale about being “an impotent, vasectomised 45-year-old father of two”, he plies a sharp, sophisticated look at the post-political correctness cultural landscape.

Lee explains the changing hegemony between Thatcherism and now in little more than a breath; ponders the political affiliation of Helena Bonham Carter; rubbishes a UKIP politician’s disingenuous concern for Bulgarians in a reducto ad absurdum rant that takes little-Englander worries all the way back through the HUgenouts and the Anglo-Saxons to the Big Bang. Masterful.

He toys, he teases, he mocks he plays. And if you can’t make it out to a theatre to be spoken down to in person, the good news is that, on this evidence, that next television series is going to be a treat.

Written by Dominic Maxwell in The Times on 23rd September 2013. Filed Under: Much A Stew About Nothing, Reviews
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