An almost full capacity audience waits patiently in line for the opening night of Stewart Lee’s new show. Behind me some bloke recites the Edward Lear poem from which the show takes its name. Stewart Lee takes the stage almost immediately we are seated. He apologises fullsomely for the delay, explaining that the Traverse were…
Comedy can be a frustrating business, even if you’re brilliant at it. For Stewart Lee, the process of being a stand-up became too much about crowd control, too little about the material. Famous as one half of TV’s Lee And Herring, he had worked on the circuit since university. After the duo were bafflingly cancelled…
An owl wakes adrift at sea in a curiously coloured boat accompanied by a cat, its natural predator. There’s some cash lying around in the hull as well as a small guitar and, rather disturbingly, some honey. And you may ask yourself: ‘Well… how did I get here?’ At least, that’s what Stewart Lee would…
Lee announces this as his “first mid-thirties pretentious one-man show”, but it retains his trademark comic perspective. The idea is that Lee, having been commissioned to write a treatment of an Edward Lear biopic to star Ray Winstone(!), becomes simultaneously obsessed with Lear’s nonsense poem and with his own problems living in a flat without…