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Much A-Stew About NothingMuch a-Stew About Nothing, Brighton Dome ★★★

By Brian Logan in The Guardian Posted on Sunday, September 22nd, 2013

Stewart Lee has set the bar so high, he can hardly be criticised for not always vaulting it. At his best, he takes comedy out on new limbs: the pleasure of laughter combines with the thrill of working out what’s so funny and why.

That happens less often tonight, while there’s an occasional reliance on old tricks and hack jokes of the type Lee would eviscerate if he heard them elsewhere. Maybe duff gags about anal sex are the only remaining way Lee can find to subvert our expectations. Or maybe the show is still, after a month of previews in Edinburgh, a work in progress: Lee takes perverse pleasure in telling us it’s just a try-out for his TV programme.

The first half is the weakest: there’s some recycled material from his 2011 set about celebrity Tories, and a repetitive riff about TV animal rescue shows that, by his own admission, needs putting out of its misery.

Patience-stretching repetition is Lee’s party piece, of course, and he leans on it here, with one skit about a little-Englander cabbie, and more successful one projecting Ukip’s fears about Bulgarian immigration back into the past, via Huguenots and Anglo-Saxons, all the way to the Big Bang.

Later highlights include a riff on Lee’s opposition to the closure of a Hackney jazz club, which toys with the liberal’s fear of appearing racist; and a slippery routine cross-fertilising the frustrations of Lee’s unromantic marriage with the solidarity he seeks to demonstrate with abused minorities. “That night,” it concludes, “my black wife and my gay wife met in my subconscious…”

This is vintage Lee, as text and subtext play cat and mouse – even if the section in which it sits, about feeling middle-aged and out-of-touch, is fairly conventional. There’s some teasing, pertinent stuff here; if only he’d hone it for the tour and not just for the telly.

Written by Brian Logan in The Guardian on 22nd September 2013. Filed Under: Much A Stew About Nothing, Reviews
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