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Basic LeeBasic Lee at the Leicester Square Theatre – classic Lee, sometimes too classic

Easy gags and brilliant ideas combine to make this a show for the faithful, if not necessarily one to win new converts

By Bruce Dessau in Evening Standard Posted on Wednesday, September 28th, 2022
Basic Lee at the Leicester Square Theatre – classic Lee, sometimes too classic

Is this the most Stewart Lee show Stewart Lee has ever performed? While it might be called Basic Lee and is purportedly a streamlined one-man-and-his-mic set, it is also so textured it has more levels than a multi-storey car park.

Lee’s aim here is to send up the art of stand-up, from revealing how to devise comic ideas to explaining how they should be delivered. There are inspired digressions, of course, and moments of brilliance alongside more obvious tropes that should be beneath a stand-up of Lee’s stature.

His political material is eloquent, the targets predictable. As he says, the news is currently so fast-moving there is no point learning his satirical schtick as it will be outdated soon, so he ostentatiously reads it off a card. Liz Truss, he suggests, is going to be “gone by next Tuesday”. Trying to write durable comedy about the PM makes as much sense as “trying to marry a disposable barbeque.”

Yet often his ideas are breathtaking. For anyone who has seen his recent BBC special, Snowflake, where he pulls grotesque faces for nine minutes, he essays a similar pomposity-pricking trick onstage. A joke about JK Rowling using the male name of Robert Galbraith for her adult thrillers both is and isn’t about gender politics. It is so good it must surely have been cracked before, but maybe without so much deadpan finesse.

For his first new show since 2019 though there are not one but three old routines. The set is bookended by two of them and in the middle there is an update of his previous withering takedown of Fleabag’s fourth wall breaking. They are all funny, but however he wants to dress them up, they are still not entirely new.

Elsewhere he circles around some familiar themes. He mocks other comedians – Kevin Bridges, Frankie Boyle, his old double act partner Richard Herring. There’s a sly swipe at Ricky Gervais, or more precisely, the superstar’s fans who trolled Lee when he recently described Gervais’ After Life as “one of the worst things that’s ever been made by a human.”

The usual motifs are here, from teasing broadsheet critics to bemoaning the fact that he feels as if his body has let itself go. Easy gags and clever gags combine in a show that ticks every box required to delight Lee’s devoted fanbase. Whether it will win over many new converts is less certain.

Written by Bruce Dessau in Evening Standard on 28th September 2022. Filed Under: Basic Lee, Leicester Square Theatre, Reviews
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