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Much A-Stew About NothingStewart Lee: Much A-Stew About Nothing – Leicester Square Theatre ★★★★

Dominic Cavendish is pleasantly surprised by his second visit to see Stewart Lee at the Leicester Square Theatre ★★★★

By Dominic Cavendish in | Dominic Cavendish" target="_blank">The Telegraph Posted on Wednesday, November 20th, 2013

When I had the temerity to explain – in a Telegraph blog post – why I gave up on Stewart Lee’s latest live show at the first interval, I was met with a ferocious torrent of online indignation.

On Twitter, for instance, Stuart Baxter got in touch to go “haha what a bell end!”, John Dyer called me a “whimp” (sic) and Deep Roy denounced me as a “T–T”. On the Telegraph site, assisted by equivalent instances of bilious contempt, the article shot up the most-viewed rankings to eclipse – do we laugh or cry? – reports on the Philippines typhoon.

I don’t think I can be alone in finding this reaction disproportionate to the complaint I levelled at Lee, which was essentially that – aside from slagging off the Telegraph, its readers and its sketchwriter Michael Deacon – he was being unusually aggressive towards his audience in that opening half, even by his combative standards. Perhaps there are punters who delight in being called “Friday night c—s” and for whom no insult from a comedian who trades in irony can be regarded as unpalatable. I didn’t feel massively affronted but I felt sufficiently disappointed to make the decision to skip the rest of Much A-Stew About Nothing, which trials new material ahead of TV recordings, with a view to visiting it again another time.

Which I duly did at the start of the week, slinking in at the back of the Leicester Square Theatre, bag at the ready just in case the assembled aficionados turned into a real-life mob. Thanks to that article – which Lee dismisses as “click-bait”, written only in order to provoke a reaction – there are some fresh laughs to be had. “I’ve read in the paper that I have contempt for the public but I don’t,” he suggested, deadpan-plaintive. “I do hundreds of gigs and I try really hard.”

It would, of course, be delusional to conclude he’d taken on board what I said but I found it interesting that he had moved the most audience-testing section to the end of the evening and didn’t refer to the crowd using four-letter words. The mood was more relaxed. Organised thus, with a succession of finely nuanced sets – dealing with UKIP, his being “an impotent, vasectomised, 45-year-old, functioning alcoholic father of two”, racism and satire – he delivered an accomplished, intelligent, manifestly likeable and tonally exact show, of the sort he usually gives and I wish I’d seen in the first place.

Written by Dominic Cavendish in The Telegraph on 20th November 2013. Filed Under: Much A Stew About Nothing, Reviews, Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle
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