Stewart
Lee at Trinity, Tunbridge Wells
*****
Dominic Maxwell November 26, 2009
If Stewart Lee’s
recent stand-up show on BBC Two has brought any newcomers to this
latest live show, then they’re jumping in at the deep end
here. If You Prefer a Milder Comedian, Please Ask For One —
yes, the clue is in the title — is right up there with the
best work this consistently surprising and beguiling comedian has
done.
 |
But
as he mixes moments of mock shock with moments of genuine
provocation, his most personal revelations with his most far-fetched
flights of fancy, we don’t always know where we stand
with him.
Does he really wish a hideous death on the Top Gear presenter
Richard Hammond? Did Magners cider really take its advertising
slogan from a Lee family saying? Did a leading coffee chain
really accuse him of faking the stamps on his reward card?
Be still, and know. |
Mind you, he
starts falteringly. His support act, the Canadian comic Tony Law,
gets a muted reception — the worst of the tour so far, Lee
reproves us. “Now this gig has got off to a bad start,”
he says slowly, a teacher taking control of the class, “and
if it’s going to work at all, you’re going to have to
pick up the pace.”
What I like
best about Lee is the way he brings a deeply-felt moral core to
work that delights in playing with surfaces. Occasionally he overplays
his hand. But mostly his digressions about the mood in the room
remind us that our responses really matter — as something
worthy of study, not as anything to pander to.
“More
than anywhere on the tour,” he tells the supposed bastions
of Middle England, “I sense a large Top Gear support.”
Pause. “The trouble is,” he continues, “I hate
Top Gear.” And, as he goes on to spin a bad-taste yarn about
Hammond, ridiculing what he sees as the hypocrisies of Clarkson
and crew, the room splits in two.
The context
is all there to justify this, just not necessarily when you feel
you need it. But show faith and he’ll deconstruct everything,
especially his own deconstructions. He takes apart his audience,
his looks — a washed-up Terry Christian/Todd Carty/young Albert
Finney — and his status as a 41-year-old father resisting
gentrification.
Some sequences,
such as an inspired one about people who rave on about “the
quality of life” abroad, are enabled by sheer performance:
control of rhythm, repetition, tone, physicality. Lee has said that
he can’t act; this proves him wrong. He even ends on a song,
accompanying himself on guitar. There’s a vital sincerity
shaking awake all these layers of irony.
One of his targets
is Frankie Boyle, who once suggested that stand-ups are no good
after 40. Well, Lee rubbishes this like he rubbishes everything
else: not in a direct act of revenge, but as a spur to finding material
that mixes the deeply felt with the deeply unlikely.
His perpetual
games with form mean that he’s not for allcomers. But if you
succumb to his spell he’s the most exciting comedian in the
country, bar none.
The
Times
