If his last few tours are anything to go by, Stewart Lee is fond of a set piece. Content Provider saw his stage strewn with DVDs and defunct computers; a flurry of snow during the closer of Snowflake; a gigantic fibreglass shark for its companion piece Tornado (which had to be shelved during the pandemic – “the most expensive two-second gag ever made”, he told our audience ruefully). For Basic Lee, however, the set-up is as quintessential as they come – one act, one microphone, one audience.

And indeed, that’s how Lee sells it – a return to and examination of the basics of the form. Of course, followers of Lee’s work know better than to take him at his word. This 90 minutes is a true return to form for the stand-up veteran, his dense web of absurdism, lampshades and structural rug pulls precision engineered and airtight.

What I was concerned about going in, if anything, was the possibility that Lee had gone a little softer of late. I enjoyed Snowflake well enough when it aired, but there was a bit of wooliness to its rhythm, hints of what my companion that night referred to as ‘Guardian Dad’. No such Lee takes the stage here, though he knows it’s a non-zero proportion of his demographic (“it’s like the Lib Dem conference”, he observes of an uproarious response to a fairly middleweight joke about Brexit).

No, this is caustic, proletarian Lee at his finest. His riffs on the monarchy and Phoebe Waller-Bridge are particular highlights, needling our tendency to disproportionately venerate and credit the privileged. Granted, Lee is not the first person to observe that the bourgeois press apparently experienced collective amnesia on the release of Fleabag as to the working class origins of directly addressing the audience in standup, vaudeville and theatre of the masses as soon as it was done by the granddaughter of a baronet. But his combination of slow-burn physical comedy, kernels of nostalgia from his early days on the circuit and masterful delivery uses this observation as a vehicle to express a sincere respect for his chosen art form and its legacy.

There are certain comedians working today who delight in making their audience ‘uncomfortable’, but Lee remains one of the few comics working that does it with any kind of artistry. Lee doesn’t shy away from offensive material – his riff on Prince Andrew will tell you that much – but his use of it is always judicious. Take, for instance, his jokes about trans people. Speaking as a trans person, hearing cis people do comedy about you often feels like being Copernicus watching someone do a tight 15 on those wacky heliocentrists – you know far more about it than they do, and history might one day vindicate you, but until then you have to contend with a lot of backwards ideas and people who are all too comfortable hearing them. Lee’s gags play with the tension of expecting trans people to be a crude punchline, raising the temperature of the room just so, before deftly turning that expectation on its head, a graceful push and pull that puts to shame the hackish, artless prejudice of your Gervaises and your Chappelles. His studiedly apophatic approach to JK Rowling and her denizens at Mumsnet had me howling.

Lee’s virtuosic ability to play the room, to test his audience’s patience to an almost tantric degree, remains unsurpassed. At the top of the set, he wearily dismisses one target of his ire with their name, followed by “blah, blah, rhythm of a joke”. But while he says it in jest, Lee knows every fundamental of that rhythm, which gives him a solid ground on which to experiment. It’s how he can expand and contract it so effectively while keeping the whole thing cohesive. I’d say it’s like jazz, but he fucking hates when you do that.

For Stewart Lee newcomers (of whom there were more than a few) your enjoyment of the set will obviously depend on your tolerance for the meta – fortunately, this is bolstered by the fact that the straight gags around which Lee builds his complex metatextual structures are just plain hilarious in and of themselves. A placebo will have the same effect whether you’re told it’s a placebo or not – for me there’s nothing to lose and everything to gain from buying into Lee’s lifting of the curtain.

Lee has never delivered a bad tour, per se, but something about this set felt leaner and more self-assured than his more recent work. There’s a real sense in the room (the Playhouse being one of the venues where Lee got his start as a working comic while still a wee Teddy Hall student), that you’re in the presence of one of the greats. The poster reads Basic Lee, but that doesn’t do it justice – this is classic Lee, fundamental Lee, quintessential Lee