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A Room With A StewStewart Lee at Bath’s Theatre Royal

By Matty Airey in Bath Gazette Posted on Friday, January 29th, 2016

STEWART Lee gigs remind me of visits to my cousins’ house when I was little.

My cousins were unkempt country boys, who had out of control hair and socks that were falling off their feet.

They were older and naughtier than me and my sister, and showed very little interest in us.

But they did just enough to keep us following them around, to witness their misdeeds.

Lee, I feel, appears to do the same. He presents an off-hand ‘I couldn’t care less if you’re here or not’ approach, while keeping the audience on board with the enticement of being let in on his marvellously disrespectful, spot-on, witty talk about everybody and everything.

And yet, underlying it all, he is actually a very warm and engaging host.

Lee tells us he knows that audiences like to come along and sit in the dark and judge whoever’s on stage.

But rather than letting us do this, he beats us to it, putting himself down before we get the chance.

“Who came to see me when I was here years back, up the road at Moles, when I was good?” he asks.

And, “You’ve all come to see me now, now that I’m irrelevant.”

He also judges us, horribly accurately, so we’re no longer the anonymous mass in the dark we thought we were.

The poor Friends of Bath Theatre Royal really get it in the neck.

He says he knows they’ve come along with the best of intentions, to support the theatre, but really they shouldn’t have bothered.

They don’t really ‘get it’ and as such they are acting as a barrier to the contagion of connection and laughter rippling round the auditorium.

He has taken the audience/performer dynamic and tinkered with it to such an extent that the walls between us and his comedy are gone.

We’re all floating in a mixture of suspended cynicism and arrested arrogance, which is nicely liberating.

I laugh so much I run out of places to wipe my tears.

He launches into an encore, and then abandons it, because it’s not working and we aren’t getting it.

I leave and start to drive home, only to discover that the road back to Stroud is closed.

It’s a freezing night and the heater in my car doesn’t work.

I’m cold and tired and this is annoying, but something about the evening I’ve just spent makes it ok.
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I’m cushioned in a warm comedy fuzz and manage to find a different way home.

Written by Matty Airey in Bath Gazette on 29th January 2016. Filed Under: A Room With A Stew, Reviews, Series 4, Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle
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