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Content Provider (The Show)Theatre Royal Norwich

★★★★★

By Deborah Cleland-Harris in Outline Online Posted on Monday, March 26th, 2018

Well I’m enjoying this, I think. “That’s cause you’re a cunt”, was Stewart Lee’s response, as if reading my mind. The insults come thick and fast, but this only means we fall for him even more. His brand of satire, around culture, politics, popular TV shows, his life, your life, weaves in and out of his well-formulated stories. He keeps beating us over the heads and we love it.

Through his anecdotes, rants and hilarious repetition, it’s clear that he’s not like most stand-up comics, he is intellectually superior: “I am up here like a God, you’re down there like pigs in a Norfolk ditch”.

The theme of the show, which is touring, was originally meant to be based around the Caspar David Friedrich painting, Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog, symbolising an individual looking for a deeper meaning to life. But this becomes peripheral to Brexit and Trump, subjects he tackles from a liberal North London (where he lives) perspective. This suits most of the audience who seem to dress like they live in North London. I’m from there, so I should know.

His premise throughout a lot of the act is that it’s hard to write content when the goal posts keep shifting, how the hell did Trump get in? What the hell is he doing? And who the hell knows what the plan is with Brexit? In one of his astute ramblings, which goes on for a good few minutes, he proclaims: “I’m not sure whether to keep Eastern Europeans being kept out of the country in my act (one minute they’re allowed to stay, the next they’re not). It’s really affecting my work… I can’t help thinking it’s affecting people in other types of work too.”

By the end of the one hour and 45 minute show, which has provided few breaks in the laughter, he skilfully weaves us back to the painting… He condemns the under 40s for being vacuous: “I’m under 40, I’ve got no future, but I’ve got this phone,“ he roars as he bashes an invisible phone with his finger and his trousers fall down around his ankles. He keeps roaring: “Don’t eat toast like normal people…just keep drinking yoghurt from a pouch and wearing your Japanese cat-face satchel bags…“

Ultimately, Lee condemns the digital world for making us more inward looking and therefore making life less meaningful: whether that’s easy access to 1p comedy DVDS (though not his, which you have to buy for at least £3.67), or finding it easy to join a fetish club, which as he proclaims in his grandparents day would have required some real research and a lot of walking. And, how, ultimately, we have become self- and selfie-obsessed and the opposite of what the painting stands for: “What about the wider world?” an important question that he raises in this five star show, Content Provider.

Written by Deborah Cleland-Harris in Outline Online on 26th March 2018. Filed Under: Content Provider (Show), Reviews
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