During the encore (though he never left the stage) of Stewart Lee’s latest show, he suggested the convoluted nature of his performances make him “impossible to review”, and I’m tempted to agree – or at least admit it seems unfair to do so while he road tests material for his next TV series.
The current Room With A Stew tour is a work-in-progress for three episodes of Lee’s brilliantly original Comedy Vehicle, and finds him in typically antagonistic form, regularly admonishing the audience for not keeping up – or missing the best jokes – as well as recalling the halcyon days when he played to a more elite crowd in the Arts Centre’s tiny Studio venue.
It’s familiar turf for anyone who has seen him before, and despite the repetitiveness of his reprimands and diatribes he plays the frustrated middle-aged intellectual to perfection as well as belly laughs from a fiercely partisan crowd.
The loyalty of his supporters is also what enables Lee to perform disjointed practice sessions – he read the encore from notes – in 1,500-seat halls.
Their reward was typically clever, unconventional material – which ranged from Lee’s futile attempts at Islamaphobic observational comedy (“to get the Daily Mail off my back”) to national identity to urine – and while there’s undoubtedly work to be done, it was as enjoyable as it was fascinating to get a glimpse “behind the wizard’s cloak” of one of the UK’s bravest comics.
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BBC iPlayer edition of discussion of Stewart Lee on A Good Read
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Patrick Kavanagh, Guardian.co.uk
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