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Much A-Stew About NothingStewart Lee: Much A-Stew About Nothing – The Lowry, Salford

By Jo Beggs in The Public Reviews Posted on Monday, February 3rd, 2014

Thanks to two sell out nights at the Lowry in the autumn, those of us who managed to miss the initial outing of Stewart Lee’s latest show get a welcome opportunity in this ‘due to popular demand’ extra date. But Lee berates us for our tardiness. If we were real fans we’d have rushed to the show the first time round.
So begins Lee’s latest offering of self pitying, world weary, sharp, intelligent stand up. He has, he tells us, already recorded much of this material for his 2014 TV series and we’re about to experience the content of three half hour shows containing all the things that are currently on his mind – pornography, immigration, and the worthlessness of existence.

Lee’s stand up has never strayed into the happier side of life and it’s certainly not about to happen now. His ‘ten minutes of jokes about dogs’ to warm up the audience stays firmly in the territory of tales of his kids stepping in excrement. It’s as though hitting middle age has been rewarded by hitting a whole new vein of gloom.
He’s more deliciously maudlin than ever. Lee hates everything. He heaps scorn on Twitter – ‘the Stasi for the Ocado generation’ – where his every move seems to be recorded by an increasingly mean-spirited populace. He hates Andrew Graham-Dixon and The Culture Show. He has nothing but contempt for Mock the Week. Taxi drivers and UKIP get a bashing. Even his wife and kids get a bit of a rough ride.

But it’s the parts of the show that demonstrate Lee’s trademark writing and delivery, in which he tips from stand up into something more like performance art, that work best. He’s honed this unique and rather brilliant performance style to perfection, pushing his material almost to breaking point, repeating lines over and over and deconstructing not only his subject matter, but his own performance. A long, one-sided telephone conversation, complete with long silences, is beautifully paced and demonstrates a brilliantly subtle physical acting skill. Most comedians wouldn’t have the nerve to keep this up for half as long.
A drawn-out and surreal routine on immigration shrewdly reveals the ignorance of prejudice. When a rather lame heckle is delivered from the back of the room he takes it head on, offering a reasoned, almost academic argument of why it doesn’t work. Lee really has mastered this comic technique now – he can even make it work when he’s off his tightly constructed script.

It’s no wonder Lee is back for this extra date, and that his shows can now fill the Lowry’s main house. He might cast himself as a washed-up, vasectomised, middle- aged, functioning alcoholic, father of two, but as a comedian Stewart Lee really is at the top of his game.

Written by Jo Beggs in The Public Reviews on 3rd February 2014. Filed Under: Much A Stew About Nothing, Reviews, Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle
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