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Carpet Remnant WorldCarpet Remnant World, Leicester Square Theatre, review ★★★★

By Dominic Cavendish in The Telegraph Posted on Monday, November 28th, 2011

So, Stewart Lee is to be the guest editor of Radio 4’s Today programme on New Year’s Eve. This announcement will doubtless put an angry spring in the step of those who enjoy running around declaring that the BBC is in the deathly grip of the liberal left.

Lee, reviled for his part in bringing Jerry Springer The Opera to the stage, and leading exponent of a rigorously deadpan and self-aware form of stand-up, continues to attract high levels of cultish devotion and splenetic hatred. For some he’s no better than the anti-Christ – even though all he’s really doing is pursuing a narrow track of sharply intelligent, acerbically amusing “anti-comedy”, a groove into which he is now almost happily – and possibly too comfortably – settled.

Presented against a backdrop of rolled-up carpets – with Lee stylishly sporting his time-warp post-punk look – Carpet Remnant World has much double-edged fun at his own expense by rehearsing his online detractors’ cruellest cuts. Handing them ammo, the bigger running joke here is that Lee hasn’t got a set to speak of. He tells us he has been too busy parenting his four-year-old son to have come up with decent material. “I don’t know anything anymore” he mock-laments, riffling through the news for topical relevance and explaining that his specialist subject nowadays is Scooby-Doo.

On one level, we’re immediately in the realm of his now-familiar contempt for comedy as commodity: in proffering some ostentatiously lame riffs on Islam and Travellers, he’s simultaneously advancing a knowingly inadequate show, and flaunting a superiority towards an audience that might find him wanting. But the way he does this – with enough gags to show you he’s funny, and enough charm to stave off bumptiousness – is masterful. And over the course of 90 minutes, he weaves a theme of sorts from thin air – proceeding from deliberately childish swipes at the Tories, past potshots at Red Ed too (“You have to have imagination on the Left – you have to look at Ed Miliband and imagine a future for democracy”) towards an artful summation of where we’re at right now: emptied out, spent, seeking something we can’t find.

Bleak but tongue-in-cheek, an oddly cheering antidote to our nameless malaise, it’s unlikely to appeal to those in search of easy festive laughs, but it should amply satisfy the converts and the wavering doubters too. That Today programme should be all right, actually.

Written by Dominic Cavendish in The Telegraph on 28th November 2011. Filed Under: Carpet Remnant World, Reviews
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